Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

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.

DO NOT attempt to bring up other people's children through your text.

You're not lonely when you're teaching, you're not quiet, you're laughing most of the time, you're having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It's the best fun in the world.

I think that my favourite animal is a baby possum, or a joey. The face of a really little joey is so divine - so, so gorgeous.

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.

Books don't harm kids they arm them.

I have very little patience with children.

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

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

I made a lot of friends at school, and they were all Africans. I could have felt very different. I didn't feel different, I didn't notice the color of their skin, I didn't notice the color of my skin and I have remembered that all my life.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.

I don't go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

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.