Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.

We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns.

Its always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can’t know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die?…Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. we have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.