Deb Caletti

My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California.

Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.

It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant.

In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending - more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen.

When your arms are out wide, you'll capture love and joy and golden moments but other things, too. Mistrust will sneak in on a wave of that joy, and complications will ride the backs of the golden moments, and there will be both love and the risks of love. That's the way it is. That's the design.

I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.

My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.

When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.

'The Nature of Jade' is about a girl who works with the elephants at the zoo near her home, and who, through her involvement with them, becomes involved with a boy and his baby.

Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.

I long for books; I am utterly greedy about them.

I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.

One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.

If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.

I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.

Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.

I've never met a popcorn ball I didn't like.