I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.
I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.
I'm interested in the human more than I'm interested in building suspense.
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.
When I write promotionally, I guess I give away the ones I'm less connected to.
Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that's very irksome.
I don't even know if Stephenie [Meyer] could tell you why she was so fixated on [Twilight] very, very contained story about these very obsessive characters. It's just an anomaly.
Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.
I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.
Anyone who's been reading my stuff can see that there's a lot of tracks being laid for future stories.
I remember being interviewed about my first novel, 'The Colour of Memory.' They kept using the expression 'your first novel,' and I said, 'No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.'
We've already established whoever is writing us is an asshole.
Life is hard, and a lot of people come home tired from work. If they're gonna spend half an hour reading, they want some entertainment and a sense of achievement. So that's what I give them. That's all I'm trying to do. Is that really so wrong?
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.
I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
Most of the names in my books have secondary meaning. Sometimes they foreshadow; sometimes they tell you about the character's origin or back story.
Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.
I don't want to write things that people don't want to read. I would have no pleasure in producing something that sold 600 copies but that was considered very wonderful. I would prefer to sell 20,000 copies because the readers loved it. When I write books I don't actually think about the market in that way. I just tell myself the story. I don't think I'm talking to a 10-year-old boy or a six-year-old girl. I just write on the level the story seems to call for.
Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy...it takes a mean author to write a good story.
I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.
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.
I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.
