Laura Amy Schlitz

“Sometimes I feel like an impostor, and I have to remind myself, 'You are able to do this.' I look at the books on the shelf that have my name on them to remind myself I have done it before and, likely, I can do it again.”

“Most of the time when you laugh, it's because something is amiss - clumsy or wrong or sad - but when you laugh at a kitten, you laugh of pure joy.”

“I was fascinated by fairies when I was growing up, and I wanted to see one dreadfully.”

“Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog, and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness.”

“When I was 4 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night and told my parents there was a witch crying outside in the boxwood bushes. I didn't know who she was or why she was crying, but I was terribly upset.”

“I became fascinated by marionettes, which I first saw in Venice. They were so haunted and so alive. You walked by them, and you could feel their presence, with their beady eyes just fixed on you.”

“I'm like a crockpot on low heat. My mind constantly comes up with ideas, but I abandon a lot of them after a week or two. It's the ones that keep coming to me, that keep picking up flavors, that haunt me, those are the ones that wind up getting written.”

“I tried for years to get an agent because I was told you needed an agent. The agent-hunting process was grim indeed.”

“But I think the most important thing those books gave me was a kind of faith. My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workaday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”

“If you're not going to wear a tiara when you win a Newbery Award, when are you going to wear one?”

“When I was a child, I wanted to be important.”

“I tell 'Hansel and Gretel' stories about heroic children who are lost in a world that seems friendly at first, and then isn't.”

“People tend to associate fairies with princesses, but they couldn't be more different. Princesses have dynastic and domestic pressures, and they get parked on glass hills. Fairies don't have families. They don't clean or cook. They sip nectar from flowers and dance by the light of the moon.”

“One day, I was at my grandmother's house, and I found diaries that she kept as a young girl. I opened one to a page that had flowers glued inside. In her childish handwriting, my grandmother wrote, 'Pap died today. I am very sad.' The fact that this was true and that I could see the withered flowers made a huge impression on me.”

“Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too.”

“As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.”

“I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.”