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The draft that finally goes to my editor doesn't get into her hands until I have read it out loud innumerable times - sometimes into a tape recorder - to make sure that it sounds right.

Kate DiCamillo

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Kate DiCamillo
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 25
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Katrina Elizabeth DiCamillo
Hands
Sounds
Recorder
Right
Finally
Recorders
Sometimes
Goes
Innumerable
Make
Sure
Draft
Sound
Editor
Read
Editors
Times
Tape
Doesn
Loud

More quotes by Kate DiCamillo

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I think for everybody reading can be a solace, illumination, education.
Kate DiCamillo
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It is our duty and our joy to communicate our hearts to each other. Words assist us in this task.
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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.
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I always go to the Agriculture Building, where they make apple cider popsicles for a dollar.
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The undoing is almost always more difficult than the doing.
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The funny thing is, when I've gone through the relentless editing process, my editor and I are amazed the Mercy Watson books still make us laugh. The same jokes that made us laugh the first time around still make us laugh in the 16th rendition.
Kate DiCamillo
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Holly McGhee said I should come to dinner with them. That first dinner, I said something pretty smart-alecky, and Alison [McGhee] laughed really hard at it. It made me happy.
Kate DiCamillo
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The closest I can get to describing what happens is that voices come to me. I feel like I'm accessing something that is deeper and richer than me.
Kate DiCamillo
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At the thought of being eaten by rats, Despereaux forgot about being brave. He forgot about not being a disappointment. He felt himself heading into another faint. But his mother, who had an excellent sense of dramatic timing, beat him to it she executed a beautiful, flawless swoon, landing right at Despereaux's feet.
Kate DiCamillo
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When I was a kid I loved to read, but I didn't write and I didn't create imaginary worlds. So, if one student walks away thinking, She's obviously just an ordinary person, yet she gets to make her living doing what she wants to do. Maybe that applies to me, too, then I feel like my time has been well spent.
Kate DiCamillo
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Love is in all of the books, and that's the connective tissue between them. There's a lot of hope in me I can feel it. These stories are balls of light for me.
Kate DiCamillo
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All of that loneliness and longing in my heart got transferred into the book Because of Winn-Dixie, I guess.
Kate DiCamillo
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I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.
Kate DiCamillo
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Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
Kate DiCamillo
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I work full-time in a used bookstore. I get up. I drink a cup of coffee. I think, The last thing I want to do is write. Then I go to the computer and write.
Kate DiCamillo
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Most of my books begin with an image or a voice - one small thing - and I don't know what it is going to become.
Kate DiCamillo
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But let's not speak of what might have been. Let us speak instead of what is. You are whole.
Kate DiCamillo
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... every time you look at the world and the people in it closely, lovingly, imaginatively, it changes you. The world, under the microscope of your attention, opens up like a beautiful, strange flower and gives itself back to you in ways you could never imagine.
Kate DiCamillo
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The themes in my books, like in life, are about grace and redemption and you never know when they're going to show up and what form they're going to be in. Stories emerge from keeping your heart open to the people that cross in front of you or the dogs or the mice, and their ability to open you up and enrich your life.
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