P. L. Travers Quotes
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Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.
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You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for - if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
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I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.
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I never wrote my books especially for children.
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I make a point of writing, if only a little, every day, as a kind of discipline so that it is not a whim but a piece of work.
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You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.
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Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.
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We'll never forget you, Mary Poppins!
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For me, there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.
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I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.
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I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.
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'Friend Monkey' is really my favorite of all my books because the Hindu myth on which it is based is my favorite - the myth of the Monkey Lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went.
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I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.
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Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
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My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.
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I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
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The silky hush of intimate things, fragrant with my fragrance, steal softly down, so loth to rob me of my last dear concealment.
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My father died when I was 7. I was his favorite child, and he was my beloved father. I brought him along with me all through my life. Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me.
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'Bird and beast and stone and star - we are all one, all one -' murmured the Hamadryad, softly folding his hood about him as he himself swayed between the children. 'Child and serpent, star and stone - all one.'
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A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
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Mary Poppins herself had flown away, but the gifts she had brought would remain for always..
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It is only through the ordinary that the extraordinary can make itself perceived.
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I read myths and fairy tales and books about them a great deal now, but I very seldom read novels. I find modern novels bore me. I can read Tolstoy and the Russians, but mostly I read comparative mythology and comparative religion. I need matter to carry with me.
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Tonight the small are free from the great and the great protect the small.