Michael Rosen

“When I was about 15 - that would be some 60 years ago - I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.”

“I can't think of how many meetings I've sat through where people have explained that language has become less important because we now live in a visual age.”

“In most countries, property law means that people can take possession of manuscripts and, in some circumstances, a lone copy of a printed text. In these cases where only one copy of the work exists the owners of the manuscript also find themselves in possession of its literature. Yet the two things ought not to be conflated.”

“Writing limericks gives us a playground, a release from these conventions.”

“People always imagine that the whole of Victorian England was sitting around reading Alice in Wonderland - in fact only a tiny minority ever did.”

“A Christmas Carol' is one of a few literary works that can be cited as a common cultural reference point, so its a text people imagine theyve read without having done so.”

“The sentimentalist in me loves it when the important things we say and do can be tied to buildings and landscape.”

“We know that the ability to take on complex ideas, to handle the notion of a multiplicity of viewpoints, to deal in abstract thought relies on a person's experience of reading widely and often - in combination with open-ended but challenging discussion.”

“Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.”

“What happens on the ground is that schools have been required to follow a literacy matrix - yes, some schools junked it - but most schools follow it. This matrix determined what children have to study and when.”

“Poetry fills clubs, halls and venues. Poets and poems can talk to the deepest feelings and to the silliest. It can be like stand-up or rock music. It can be intimate, it can be pubic.”

“The empty room of someone who has gone to college, or is on holiday, is not much different from someone who has just died. We live in rooms. Then we don't.”

“Yes, it's possible to play computer games on your own and many do. But I also see children playing them in pairs and fours for hours on end and the air is full of talk and banter.”

“When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it's really happened.”

“We've all been children, we all know a parent or parent-figure. This makes us all potential writers of children's books.”

“Academies can also flog off land and buildings, if the much weakened local authorities agree. Serious money can be made, management salaries are high, and hidden in all this is the long-term public subsidy in such sites.”

“What's difficult to do in books for children is to create funny incidents. Funny images, funny language and any kind of taboo-breaking is not difficult.”

“Change in language is hard to capture and when it's visible or audible; it is also hard for some to accept.”

“If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.”

“My main motive for going into children's literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I imagine I'm returning the favour.”