Michael Rosen

“I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.”

“Anxiety about the possibility that children will be corrupted if they hear rude words has been around for a long time.”

“At around 16, I became obsessed with James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. I was absorbed by the sense of someone trying to break out of an institution but then became interested in Joyces experimental way of writing.”

“I think grammar teaching should start with real examples of language in use: journalism, fiction, songs, ads, instructions, headlines, transcripts of conversations and so on.”

“Its social: in doing the arts we find out what we need from each other. But its also about survival - surviving as individuals, as groups, but also as the human race.”

“As I began to perform - songs, poems, sketches or conjuring tricks - I began to learn what children run with and what they dont. I discovered that, quite often, an element of surprise or absurdity might be the key to unlocking laughter.”

“When it comes to the UK, our problem is that weve never decolonised.”

“I was very lucky to have been brought up in a household where my older brother and my father read out loud to me as a teenager. It was a form of conversation or entertainment.”

“You can give up the best years of your life knowing that no matter what you do or how you do it, your step-child may not love you or want or need to have anything to do with you once they have left home.”

“The parents who read with their children and fill their houses with books produce the highest achievers.”

“The way to take the arts seriously is not to defend this or that art form for its own sake. Pursuing arts activities with humane and democratic principles in mind is where the benefit lies.”

“The wave of feeling that can overcome an adult when he or she opens a book that was read to them by a loved parent or teacher can be quite stunning.”

“Books are low-tech, portable packages of the widest range of human experience, presented in a format which gives time to grasp complex ideas or to spend time in imaginative worlds.”

“One of the many falsities of fiction that we accept quite happily is the non-ageing of characters as they appear across series and sequels.”

“The starting point for English work must be the ability to handle effectively their own experience. Oral work, written work and the discussion of literature must create an atmosphere in which the pupils become confident of the full acceptability of the material of their own experience.”

“My parents bookshelves were full of books that belonged to their lives in the Communist party.”

“I was the youngest, and there was my mother, my father and my brother. They each had their own way of turning anything, from washing up an eggcup to a chase across the North York Moors to catch up with a train, into a comic account.”

“Any child who reads widely, often and for pleasure will inevitably make comparisons between what they're reading, why they're reading and how they're reading.”

“If we are serious about enabling those who want to acquire what we have called standard English then first we should be honest about change and its lack of encoded rules. Then, together with them, we should look closely at how such people's speech and writing diverges from the kind of English that they would like to acquire.”

“Ive lived in London all my life. There are some parts of London where a high percentage of people are on the bottom level of incomes. Treating such people as privileged is absurd and insulting.”