The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.

If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.

I hate being good. -Mary Poppins

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for, if you are honest, you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.

The same substance composes us--the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star--we are all one, all moving to the same end.

What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

Children's books are looked on as a sideline of literature. A special smile. They are usually thought to be associated with women. I was determined not to have this label of sentimentality put on me so I signed by my intials, hoping people wouldn't bother to wonder if the books were written by a man, woman or kangaroo.

I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.

Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.

Perhaps we are born knowing the tales of our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run in our blood repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first bear them is not of surprise but of recognition.

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

I've felt that if I just used initials nobody would know whether I was a man or a woman, a dog or a tiger. I could hide from view, like a bat on the underside of a branch.

Tea is balm for the soul, don't you agree?

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.

Could it be ... that the hero is one who is willing to set out, take the first step, shoulder something? Perhaps the hero is one who puts his foot upon a path not knowing what he may expect from life but in some way feeling in his bones that life expects something of him.