Write Or Draw Or Build Or Sing

It Would Have Been Hard For Fat Charlie To Say Exactly When The Accumulation Of Birds On The Wire Mesh Moved From Interesting To Terrifying. It Was Somewhere In The First Hundred Or So, Anyway. And It Was In The Way They Didn't Coo, Or Caw, Or Trill, Or Song. They Simply Landed On The Wire, And They Watched Him.

Making Fiction For Children, Making Books For Children, Isn't Something You Do For Money. It's Something You Do Because What Children Read And Learn And See And Take In Changes Them And Forms Them, And They Make The Future. They Make The World We're Going To Wind Up In, The World That Will Be Here When We're Gone. Which Sounds Preachy (and Is More Than You Need For A Quotebyte) But It's True. I Want To Tell Kids Important Things, And I Want Them To Love Stories And Love Reading And Love Finding Things Out. I Want Them To Be Brave And Wise. So I Write For Them.

I Would Not Wish To Marry Someone Who Had Already Been Married. It Would Be,' She Opined, 'like Having Someone Else Break In One's Own Pony.

Let Us Begin This Letter, This Prelude To An Encounter, Formally, As A Declaration, In The Old-fashioned Way: I Love You. You Do Not Know Me (although You Have Seen Me, Smiled At Me). I Know You (although Not So Well As I Would Like. I Want To Be There When Your Eyes Flutter Open In The Morning, And You See Me, And You Smile. Surely This Would Be Paradise Enough?). So I Do Declare Myself To You Now, With Pen Set To Paper. I Declare It Again: I Love You.

I Was The Kind Of Kid Whose Parents Would Drop Him Off At The Local Town Library On Their Way To Work, And I'd Go And Work My Way Through The Children's Area.