I don't know why some people have children at all if they know that they can only take a few weeks off work.

My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.

Putting babies as young as two weeks into child care for the first year of their life, for 60 hours a week, will cause their brains damage.

I think sometimes we rush through countries, ticking off the attractions, but that's missing the point.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.