children-s-authors

"In general appearance the is an extremely large and powerful fellow, with a beautiful head and speaking countenance, in which sagacity is blended with nobility, and a body of great symmetry, combining, one might say, the agility of the with the strength of the ."

"Every child knows how fond cats are of hunting and catching mice, but no cat any respectability would think of confining her attention to mice alone. The very presence of a cat about a house will usually suffice to keep these destructive pests at bay; and if one should pop out of its hole, it knows, or ought to know, what to expect."

"Three days at , and up anchor again; our next place of call being . Every one has heard of the , who tried to beat the British but didn't, ... was caught and chained ... to a rock somewhere in the middle of the sea ... The rock was St. Helena, and a very beautiful rock it is too, hill and and thriving town, its mountain sides tilled and its s and s containing many a fertile little farm. It is the duty of every one who touches the shores of this far-famed island to make a pilgrimage to .... both sides of the road all the way to the tomb are strewn with , empty of course, and at the grave itself there are s of them; and the same is the case at every place which has visit4ed, or where English foot has ever trod."

"When I was a little boy at school, floundering through Herodotus, and getting double doses of fum-fum daily for my Anabasis—for my old teacher, when he couldn't get enough Greek into one end of me, took jolly good care to put it in at the other—there was no man I had greater respect for than Alexander the Great, owing to his having done that business so neatly. I practiised afterwards on the dominie's tawse (i.e., the fum-fum strap); I tied a splendid knot on it, and then cut it through with a jackknife; but woe's me! the plaguy dominie caught me in the very act, and—and I had to take my meals standing for a week."

"I have dozens of well-authenticated anecdotes of cats who are very expert at fishing. I have, myself, watched a cat by the banks of a stream, until I have seen him dive into the the water, and emerge almost immediately with a large in his mouth. Cats who fish, generally belong to s, or are bred and reared somewhere near a river. They not only catch fish of all sorts, but even s; often springing many feet off the bank after prey of this kind, and even diving under to secure it. In Scotland cats often attack and destroy large quantities of salmon in small streams, in the spawning season."

"Very few of the old s interfere with the duties of their assistants, but there be men who seem to think you have merely come to the service to learn, not to practise your profession, and therefore they treat as mere students, or at the best hobble-de-hoy doctors. Of this class was Dr. Gruff, a man whom I would back against the whole profession for , , , or ; but who, I rather suspect, never prescribed a dose of , , or in his life."

"When all is said and all is done, When all is lost or all is won— In spite of musty theory, Of purblind faith and vain conceit, Of barren creed and sophistry; In spite of all—success, defeat— The judge applies to worst and best, Impartially, this final test:What hast thou done with brawn and brain, To help the world to lose or gain An onward step? Canst reckon one Unselfish, brave or noble deed That thou—nor counting cost—hast done To help a brother's crying need? Not what professed nor what believed— But what good thing hast thou achieved!"

"King David and King Solomon Led merry, merry lives, With many, many lady friends, And many, many wives; But when old age crept over them— With many, many qualms, King Solomon wrote the Proverbs And King David wrote the Psalms."

"Timothy Winters comes to school With eyes as wide as a football-pool, Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters: A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters."

"Leisurely,They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'I had not thought that it would be like this."

"Henry is thinking of his lute and of backgammon, Elizabeth follows the waving song, the mystery, Proud in her red wig and green jewelled favours; They sit in their white lawn sleeves, as cool as history."

"At Morning Prayers the Master helves For children less fortunate than ourselves, And the loudest response in the room is when Timothy Winters roars 'Amen!'So come one angel, come on ten: Timothy Winters says 'Amen Amen amen amen amen.' Timothy Winters, Lord. Amen."

"O are you the boy Who would wait on the quay With the silver penny And the apricot tree?"

"They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet.My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light."

"That was all, but I was fizzing with excitement. It didn't matter what the picture was of. It didn't matter that Master Ho had stumbled rather than walked… I had done something momentous. I had opened up another dimension to the still picture. I had given it the extra dimension of time. I had made it come to life."

"We would go to the BBC once a year, show them the films we'd made, and they would say, "Yes, lovely, now what are you going to do next?" We would tell them, and they would say, "That sounds fine, we'll mark it in for eighteen months from now", and we would be given praise and encouragement and some money in advance."

"I was also invited to give a couple of informal seminars to the Animation School at the RCA. These were so informal that they could hardly have been said to happen, but they taught me more than I really wanted to know about the way in which our simple craft had been inflated into a maniac pretentious pseudo-art."

"And they [Smallfilms] had a superb ear for creating sound effects that children could easily mimic the moment the programme had finished: just think about the swanny-whistle voices of the Clangers, the beatbox rhythm of Ivor's engine, or the marvellous carousel of just bloody lovely sounds that made up most of Bagpuss […] These are the sounds I hear in my own head when I remember my own childhood, and Oliver Postgate put them there."

"Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn’t matter. The viewers didn’t notice because they were enjoying the stories."

"What matters most is the story, and it should never be sacrificed to the method. These days immense quantities of money are spent making something that doesn't call for it. As a result, to raise enough backing, children's films have to be dumbed down for the widest possible market."

"That voice of his was loved by the nation. I mean, if I could've been Oliver Postgate, with that voice, and with his mind, and those wonderful, wonderful stories, I would have given my teeth. He puts his arms round you, figuratively speaking, and says "Look, it's all right. Don't worry. Whatever I'm on about at this moment, there's security here with me." And that's the voice that does it; I had to work to be loved, Oliver Postgate, lucky man, didn't."

"And all of these things, the selection of just the right characters, just the right soundtrack, and just the right tone is an incredibly hard thing to pull off in TV; incredibly hard. You can't fake it, you can't screw up your face and slog your way through it: it only occurs when an innate facet of someone's character is allowed to bleed into the production, giving it a unique personality and resonance all of it's own."

"Being creative, having to do something new, invent something, alter things, in order to show you're still there is a personality fault, basically. I think a lot of people who have done creative things do so because if they don't, they cease to exist. This, I know, is true of myself, and I wouldn't wish it onto other people. There is nothing quite like as frightening as having a wife and six children and a blank piece of paper, which is your next year's feeding, and you have to pull out of the sky your livelihood. The idea of being able to live on one's creativity, where you are dubious of its continuity, is a recipe for terrible anxiety."

"Animation wasn't so much an imitation of life - it was a punctuation of conversation. We always stayed on the one who was talking. It made for a very simple film that was very clear, and there were no unnecessary things going on all around the edges. If I'm going to say something to you then I'm going to do it with a certain amount of gestures; in-between the times I'm completely still. This was how we managed to get through 120 seconds of footage a day, when most studios were getting through 10 seconds. We'd never move a mouth, we'd change the expression, because people were watching the hands."

"All the way through, if you look at my films, you will see that my animation is very economical, but very powerful. Because, I'm not recreating life, I am illustrating a story and telling a story by an extension of the pen. I'm coming at it from the other direction, and what is the minimum amount of visual delivery that I have to do to get this to appear to be alive, which one has accepted more or less anyway that they're there, and to convey the movements, and it is surprising how much one needn't do, and how much better it is from not doing those things that animation doesn't do well."

"The films we made were aimed at the Head of Department at the BBC, who was about 57 at the time, and she was a nice lady called Ursula Eason, and very humane and ordinary, and full of fun. If we had studied children in any way, apart from having children, we wouldn't necessarily have succeeded in selling the films, because the woman at the BBC had fairly clear opinions of what she would find acceptable, and these were conditioned in some ways by the fact she was a middle-aged, English (well, Irish actually, if you go all the way back) lady, who was brought up as I was on Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, and Lewis Carroll, and all the sort of 'Founding Fathers' of English Tweeness."

"Their [politicians] words and phrases are skillfully chosen to keep us complacent and confident in our fairly comfortable world. We don’t usually notice this because ours is a world in which whether or not the words we are offered are true rarely makes much difference to our lives. But, out in the real world, the way words are used or misused can make the difference between life and death."

"[Responding to the perceived surrealism of Clangers] They're surreal but logical. I have a strong prejudice against fantasy for its own sake. Once one gets to a point beyond where cause and effect mean anything at all, then science fiction becomes science nonsense. Everything that happened was strictly logical according to the laws of physics which happened to apply in that part of the world."

"If you would succeed in the world, it is necessary that, when entering a salon, your vanity should bow to that of others."

"To weep is not always to suffer."

"Homeliness is the best guardian of a young girl's virtue."

"Men call physicians only when they suffer; women, when they are merely afflicted with ennui."

"If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately and betake yourself to "Sandford and Merton" or similar standard juvenile works. Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are."

"How lucky you are, to love and to be loved in return.”"

"I have a twin sister whose name is Anne, and as we live in the same city I’m constantly getting mistaken for her, and people are always asking ‘Are you Helen or Anne?’ And I’m so bored with the question, and I’m not listening, and I say ‘Anne’ without thinking. And then I realise and is it better to say, I’m sorry, I made a mistake! or to try to brazen it out, hoping no-one will realise?"

"I read a tremendous amount. But I also ride a mountain bike round the Wellington hills and on bike tours, and sail and tramp."

"I’m in love with that girl,” she said out loud in amazement, because she knew that this was a life-changing thing and life-changing things should be said aloud, should have a moment in time, and a place in the air, some molecular structure to make them real. I’m in love with that girl, she heard as it reverberated inside her head. And it was truth, she realised, as things are which you don’t think, but discover have always existed.”"

"I started writing as a child, and then it got lost, and it was only when I began reading to my own children that I thought ‘I could do as well as this person’. Now one of the great rewards of writing is having characters constantly in your head, and seeing the world through their eyes and thinking about how they might respond to things that happen to them, and being aware of yourself in them."

"The worst is when you can’t think where to go in your writing, and an idea won’t get written."

"Write! (See the first sentence above - ‘best and worst thing about being a writer’)"

"Can’t bring it down to one. Which part of childhood, anyway? When you were little and my mother used to read Beatrix Potter and the Winnie the Pooh books? Or when I was older and used to sneak read Enid Blyton (my mother didn’t approve of those!) No, better to say I read a vast amount, and on all sorts of subjects, and I loved historical fiction, and The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring (and the rest of the Trilogy), Drovers Road, the Narnia books, Kate Seredy books about Hungary before the First World War, Patricia Lynch books set in Ireland - all sorts."

"Writing is not about inspiration! In the main it’s about hard work and frustration and rewriting and rewriting. But there are moments. The best are when you’re writing and suddenly, words seem to flow from your fingertips and ideas happen that you haven’t had to work for and you don’t know where they came from."

"Well, Louie, you’ll know then that Leviticus also tells us not to cut our beards, not to wear linen and wool together nor to eat crayfish or frogs or snails. I’m afraid that if we adhered to Leviticus the entire French nation would be an abomination in the eyes of the Lord"

"I don’t think I have one - I like a lot, and we cook a lot with Asian spices like lemon grass and fish sauce."

"I really like learning, and I liked learning when I was small. I guess I was one of those model pupils - except in one subject - see below."

"What is your favourite food?"

"I am in love. It just happened, I never sought it, but I couldn't turn away from it"

"That’s honestly how simple it is."

"It is not complex."

"Later, my white neighbour will come over to my house and say: Let me explain something to you, Tusiata. “Racism is like a scab on your knee”, and “if you pick it”, what will happen? “Leave it alone and it will heal”, otherwise I fear the “wound will get infected”. And what will happen to me then? Huh? What will happen to me then?"