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What was it like...to have someone who knew you would always return and who welcomed you with open arms?

Kate DiCamillo

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Kate DiCamillo
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 25
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Katrina Elizabeth DiCamillo
Would
Like
Welcomed
Arms
Return
Knew
Open
Someone
Always

More quotes by Kate DiCamillo

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I think of Mercy Watson like a superball there's a bouncy kind of optimism to her stories. She allows me to play, and she makes me laugh. Hopefully readers feel the same way.
Kate DiCamillo
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Mercy Watson was a character that had been in my head for a long time.
Kate DiCamillo
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I was visiting my mother in Florida when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened. I was working on The Tale of Despereaux at that point. I had already gone into writing it with a great deal of trepidation and fear, and then this God-awful thing happens and it was really hard to even get back home to Minneapolis.
Kate DiCamillo
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I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.
Kate DiCamillo
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Mercy Watson is obsessed with toast. What was blocking me was the challenge of trying to understand what she loves, what motivates her. That was the missing piece. Toast became the physical symbol of Mercy's hopefully endearing greed and obsession. Without that element in place, it didn't make sense.
Kate DiCamillo
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To me the book is like having a kid. I have to let it go out in the world, and great things will happen. Maybe they won't, but it has to keep on moving.
Kate DiCamillo
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Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.
Kate DiCamillo
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I write two pages - that's all I write. It takes me about an hour. I've learned that's all I'm capable of and to push myself beyond that is foolhardy. It's a very delicate thing, and I will not abuse it. So I write two pages, then I get up from the computer.
Kate DiCamillo
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I think Tony Fucile, who did the illustrations [for Bink & Gollie], is an absolute genius. I've never met him.
Kate DiCamillo
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Her sister, Holly McGhee, is an agent, and she's my agent in New York. She's Alison's agent too. Even though Alison lives here in Minneapolis, I met Alison through Holly, when Holly came to Minneapolis to visit Alison.
Kate DiCamillo
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This is a wonderful joke to play upon a prisoner, to promise forgiveness.
Kate DiCamillo
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Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.
Kate DiCamillo
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Each new friendship can make you a new person, because it opens up new doors inside of you.
Kate DiCamillo
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There are so many difficult things and stories can make them palatable. That's the way I have always felt.
Kate DiCamillo
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I didn't start working on children's books until I got a job at a book warehouse on the children's floor. When I started reading some of the books, I was so impressed.
Kate DiCamillo
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What I hope is that the book [Bink & Gollie] delights children. What I hope is that they laugh and laugh and laugh, just as we did when we wrote them.
Kate DiCamillo
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Rob Horton, the main character of The Tiger Rising, was a secondary character in an adult short story I wrote, and he wouldn't go away after I'd finished the short story. I couldn't figure out what he wanted, so I wrote to find out.
Kate DiCamillo
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We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.
Kate DiCamillo
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I've never worked with a co-author before [Alison McGhee]. Writing for me is a pretty scary thing, so it was a huge comfort to have someone in the room working with me. It became less like work and more like play.
Kate DiCamillo
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There ain't no point in making soup unless others eat it. Soup needs another mouth to taste it, another heart to be warmed by it.
Kate DiCamillo