Quotes by Katherine Paterson

About Katherine Paterson:

Katherine Paterson is a Chinese-born American author best known for children's novels. For four different books published 1975-1980,she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of three people to win the two major international awards: for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998. For her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense", she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2006, the biggest prize in children's literature. She was awarded the 2007 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature. She was the second U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, 2010–2011, and she received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the American Library Association in 2013.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.

Katherine Paterson

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.

Katherine Paterson

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, ...

Katherine Paterson

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

Katherine Paterson

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.

Katherine Paterson

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 abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does ...

Katherine Paterson

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 that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own ...

Katherine Paterson

She wasn't scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light

Katherine Paterson

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

Katherine Paterson

I feel very silly saying to you, Tell me all about yourself, but I wish you would. I want to get to know you." That's not how you get to know people. Don't you know? You can't talk it out, you've got to live into their lives, bad and good. You'll kno...

Katherine Paterson

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-...

Katherine Paterson

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.

Katherine Paterson

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

Katherine Paterson

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Katherine Paterson

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

Katherine Paterson

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.

Katherine Paterson

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.

Katherine Paterson

I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.

Katherine Paterson

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

Katherine Paterson

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.

Katherine Paterson

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.

Katherine Paterson

Author Bio

  • NameKatherine Paterson
  • DescriptionAmerican children's book author
  • BornOctober 31, 1932
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Children's Writer
  • WorksThe Master Puppeteer; Bridge To Terabithia; The Great Gilly Hopkins; Jacob Have I Loved
  • AwardsNewbery Medal; Hans Christian Andersen Award; Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award