When I read to children, I try to become the characters. It's great if you can make a separate voice for each character. Sometimes you can lower your voice with excitement or get more intimate about it: you can lean forward and engage the children as a narrator or as a reader. It's particularly important that you find the voice that you want to use for each character, because then children can imagine that person as you're reading aloud. And of course, the illustrations help enormously.

If you're tearing around in a panic about something, then it puts everyone else in a panic as well.

I thought it was all a flash in the pan. It wasn't until Broadway came along that I felt I had really made it.

I am a liberated woman. And I do believe if a woman does equal work she should be paid equal money. But personally I am feminine and I do like male authority to lean on.

I feel an enormous responsibility to bridge the gap between England and America, and be a sort of very quiet ambassador for my country to try to sort of do a "hands across the water" thing where they understand England and English people understand Americans. I adore America.

My books have three W's on them, which are "words," "wisdom," and "wonder." Words inevitably lead to wisdom, and wisdom inevitably leads to wonder and awe at this phenomenal world around us.

I Google'd myself a lot of times believe me. A lot of people know more about me than I knew.