Life & Wisdom Quote by Kate DiCamillo

The joke lands because it politely demolishes a cherished credential. A Bachelor of Arts in English is supposed to sound like authority: taste, insight, maybe a faint aura of tweed. DiCamillo reroutes it to something almost aggressively plain: reading, lots of it, on purpose. The humor is dry and disarming, a little Midwestern in its refusal to brag. She’s not saying the degree is useless; she’s puncturing the idea that it’s mystical.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it reframes expertise as practice rather than pedigree. “Formal training in reading” makes the hidden labor of literature visible: the hours of close attention, the repeated exposure to sentence-level choices, the slow calibration of empathy and skepticism. Second, it subtly elevates reading over writing. Coming from a celebrated children’s novelist, that’s a quiet manifesto: the writer’s real apprenticeship is not workshops or inspiration, but sustained, disciplined absorption of other minds on the page.

The subtext is a critique of how we market the humanities. English departments often defend themselves with grand claims about critical thinking and cultural literacy. DiCamillo, instead, offers a modest truth that’s harder to dismiss and harder to monetize: you get good at reading by reading seriously. In a moment when STEM is treated as the only practical route and “English major” is a punchline, she flips the punchline back. Reading isn’t ornamental; it’s a trained capacity. For an author whose work depends on clarity, feeling, and trust in young readers, that insistence is quietly radical.