Words matter. These are the best Michael Morpurgo Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Admitting failure is quite cleansing, but never – pleasurable.
You know, I really wish now I’d had the nerve to become an actor. Because I’d have been Robert Redford, no question.
As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.
Everyone is interested in war, in that people don’t want it to happen. I’m much more interested in peace than in war but it’s important to understand why we fight.
Write because you love it and not because it is something that you think you should do. Always write about something or somebody you know about – something that you feel deeply and passionately about. Never try and force it.
Some writers – most, I suspect – write in isolation. I think I’d always found that quite difficult.
I write fiction. I make things up, it’s what I do.
Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and most necessary steps in education and librarians, teachers and parents all over the country know it. It is our children’s right and it is also our best hope and their best hope for the future.
You get to about 65 or 70 and you lose friends and the world does seem to be an endlessly difficult place and tragic place, so it’s more and more difficult for me to find the bright lights.
Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children. It’s not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.
To write something you have to feel it and know it, and that’s not comfortable.
I fill up the well of stories in my head – without ever knowing I’m doing it.
Remember to write for yourself, not for a market and give yourself time to develop your own style, your own voice. It takes a lifetime. Enjoy it!
It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn’t inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.
A lot of children, like I did, move away from words because of the fear – which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you’ll get, detention, worrying about letting people down, your parents, teachers.
There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ or the ‘Gruffalo’ or ‘Northern Lights.’ When it’s a great book, it’s a great book, whether it’s for children or not.
Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.
With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time – she was a busy woman – but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.
I think there’s something about studying a book which will kill it if you’re not careful.
Paying more heed to the lessons of the past might teach us to be a little more cautious about some of the political decisions taken today.
Much that is great in literature is an acquired taste, and you have to acquire it in the first place. Our job as parents is essentially to pass on the enthusiasm we had for the things we loved. That’s how we’ll get them to fall in love with reading in the first place and, hopefully, to stay in love with it.
Wherever my story takes me, however dark and difficult the theme, there is always some hope and redemption, not because readers like happy endings, but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in the morning, that there is a light at the end of every tunnel.
War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the ‘pity of war’ as Wilfred Owen called it.
When children are very young, you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that, not gloss over them.
