Kate DiCamillo Quotes

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I think a lot of Magnum was me.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

I guess I'm trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

I think watching TV has influenced my books, but I don't think writing TV has.

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

I think people will discover themselves in 'Ankahee.'

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

There's some of me in all my characters.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.