I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools. My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

'Thou shalt not' might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart.

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.