In being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning.
What else did I long for as a child? I wanted action. I wanted characters brought right to the very edge of themselves.
You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it.
For more than three thousand years we have been inventing mythical creatures, but the reason we have done so is less clear. One theory is that we built creatures to match the inexplicable remains we found. The Indigenous American mythological beast, the Thunder Bird, may well have stemmed from T-Rex skeletons.
There are books that give you nothing except relentless battles, didactic hectoring or crass sentimentalism – but then there are many very bad songs, and it does not turn us off the concept of music. There are many bad dinners, but it does not turn us off the concept of feasting.
Resistance and change often begin in art.
The market abhors all values that are not the values of the market...
The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood.
Yet the thing I longed for most in children’s books were stories that would salute the reader’s intelligence...
A good joke exposes nonsense...
All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will speak to them both now and in their future.
But you cannot claim to be a magician and fail to produce the rabbit.
Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible.
Social media is designed to grip like iron. It will solve the panic of boredom, but it cannot take you beyond itself: its model is devised to hold you tight.
In being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning.