Morris Gleitzman Quotations

Most of your life after puberty, you're either seeking to reproduce or living with the consequences of having done so. At 70, you start going back to being 11 again.

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

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.

Because kids are physically smaller, there's an assumption by people who haven't read a kids' book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometimes the opposite is true.

I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.

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

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.

It's our potential for good stuff I'm most interested in exploring, but that has most meaning when juxtaposed with things that can go wrong.

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.