I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O’Connor. She was a huge influence.

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things....

In the end she just said….. All I did was to run away for a few minutes! All I wanted was to be free!

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

The sounds and rhythms of words are really important to me.

Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

There’s light and joy, but there’s also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.

It’s always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house. “What on earth will you be doing with something so large?” said Mum.”I shall live in it with my servants, of course,”...

I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It’s dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat...

I sit in my treeI sing like the birdsMy beak is my penMy songs are my poems.

Everybody’s got the seam of goodness in them, Kit,” said Grandpa. “Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.

And I’ve been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds...

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled. –Mina

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and . . . Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do...

What is the purpose of living if there are no perils to be encountered and overcome?

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. Did you know that?”I said nothing.”What colour’s a blackbird?” she said.”Black””Typical!

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.We let the stars shine into us.

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she...

Look at all the life in this,” she said. “Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to...

We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.

Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became...

I know I’m writing better now than I ever did for adults because I’m writing for an audience who know that they don’t know everything.

It’s called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.’She looked up from her book.’I would hope, though,’ she went on, ‘that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don’t you?’ –Mina

It was great to see the owls,” I said.She smiled.”Yes. They’re wild things, of course. Killers, savages. They’re wonderful.

Themes around education and learning run through my work.

Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.I turn my face towards it and I laugh.Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make...

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people...

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in...

The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53

The season of evil,” I echoed. “Protect your soul.