Katherine Paterson

“Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.”

“It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.”

“I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.”

“Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.”

“All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.”

“I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.”

“Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.”

“The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.”

“The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.”

“When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.”

“I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.”

“I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.”

“If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?”

“I like to write about a lot of things, which is why my books are different. This is probably why I don't like to write sequels, but chiefly I like to write about people.”

“Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'”

“Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.”

“Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.”

“I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.”

“All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”

“You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.”