Katherine Paterson

“Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do.”

“The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 ab...”

“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...”

“The basic task of education is the care and feeding of the imagination.”

“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 ba...”

“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.”

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

“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 fr...”