Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It’s a way of making progress.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.