David Almond

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

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

“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 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 will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.”

“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," said Mina. "Or I shall establish a school.""A school, my lady?""Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.”

“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 infinity."I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers."Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.”

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

“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!”

“Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.”

“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 future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”

“The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

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

“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.”

“Themes around education and learning run through my work.”

“Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.”

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

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