Katherine Paterson

“The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.”

“A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.”

“I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.”

“On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.”

“The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.”

“Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.”

“I'd like for the young people, and older ones, too, who don't count themselves as readers, to know the joy of reading and what it does to enrich your life in so many ways.”

“Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.”

“My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.”

“I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.”

“You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.”

“It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.”

“I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.”

“Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.”

“life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough”

“I'm a great believer in research. I have to know about a place before I write a story that is set in that place.”

“Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied”

“We do have trouble dealing with death, but it's the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.”

“I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.”

“If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.”