Kevin Crossley-Holland

“Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg.”

“Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.”

“Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.”

“When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.”

“Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.”

“Playing in an orchestra is completely different to playing on my own.Sometimes I played, sometimes listened; instead of waiting my turn, I sometimes interrupted another player, sometimes I argued, sometimes agreed.My flute is my mouthpiece and I felt as if I was actually joining in a conversation.”

“Everything, I thought, everything keeps changing. Changing shape, changing colour, changing sound.”

“In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.”

“A culture finds the gods it needs.”

“I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.”

“There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does.”

“Like any decent researcher, I throw away 90% of my research.”

“Maybe if I ever come to write about my teens and adulthood - and I can't imagine I will - but if I do, then maybe I will want to say a bit more about the ways in which my parents' relationship with one another impacted on me in later years.”

“For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.”

“I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.”

“Think of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.' It is equally intoxicating for children and adults. All this 'crossover' talk is something publishers are using as a selling device - a kind of post hoc rationalisation of what was happening already.”