Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.

As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.

If reading becomes a bore, mental death is on the way. Children taught to read by tedious mechanical means rapidly learn to skim over the dull text without bothering to delve into its implications -- which in time will make them prey to propaganda and to assertions based on scanty evidence, or none.

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience.

The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact.

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them.