Morris Gleitzman

“I used to get stuck trying to find the first sentence of a story, then I realised that it was often because I didn't know what problem a character was facing in the story. As soon as I did, I could have the character trying to do something about it or have the problem whack him between the eyes.”

“I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.”

“Boys, particularly, like stories where they can have images in their imagination, where they can go to scary places and experiment with what can happen.”

“When I did finally live in the Dandenongs, the mountain ash forests became an important part of my life.”

“In all of my books, I'm taking them on an emotionally challenging and sometimes physically dangerous process with a bit of fun and anarchy along the way. With the power comes responsibility.”

“Children know when they are being sold a sanitised version of the world, and I think that's a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader.”

“Children have limited power to shape their own lives, but when they can experiment with possibilities through books, their optimism can be recharged and kept alive.”

“I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness.”

“Melbourne is my type of city, much more so than Sydney.”

“I think, to be a successful author, you've got to be part recluse and part show-off.”

“I like to write stories where young people have a strong feeling about something being fair or unfair, right or wrong, cruel or kind, and they act on the basis of that - often in the face of the prevailing limits of behaviour.”

“I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.”

“At around nine or 10 years of age, young people start to decide for themselves what's moral or not, and that's why I like writing for that age group so much.”

“The type of stories I write are about young people grappling with the biggest problems in their lives, often problems that are bigger than they're actually capable of solving.”

“I think probably you can either write for kids, or you can't. That ability to imaginatively be a child and see the world as a child and feel and think like a child - you either have that ability or you don't.”

“Step-parenting and being a step-sibling presents a lot of exciting opportunities. When families break up and re-form, there may be less order, less certainty, and a bit more trauma involved, but kids can end up having half-a-dozen parent figures.”

“Because of my poor writing posture, I started walking in the forest every day, and I found it a potent place to be creatively. It changed me in that it was a new way of doing my creative process, and I realised how much I liked being among tall trees.”

“Stories can bring alive the moral universe in a very vivid, useful, engaging way.”