A lot of my characters are underdogs or sad or lonely, but I had a comfortable, golden sort of childhood.

Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older.

You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'.

Maurice Sendak is the daddy of them all when it comes to picture books - the words, the rhythm, the psychology, the design.

As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.

Never forget that children are at the heart of everything we do. Respect them, listen to them, talk to them as equals, and care about them.

Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.

I'm impressed by the way some illustrators develop their images on computers, but it's too late for me to start, and I'm still in love with paper and paint and pencils.

After art college, I got a job as a medical illustrator, and I was pretty good. I had to imagine what was going on in the operations because the photographs just showed a mess.

When I was a boy, I was a worrier, and so was my son, Joe. I used to tell him that worrying meant he had an imagination and that one day he'd be pleased.

Inspiring passion in children for books, and the world of imagination and creativity fuelled by them, is a fundamental reason for why the Children's Laureate post exists.

Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.

Attachments that are not fostered may lend to the child's inability to properly attach or have no attachment at all.

People who believe in buried gods, ’ said Louis.‘Do you believe in buried gods, Detective Walsh?’‘I’m Episcopalian. I believe in everything.

In the long run, with profits from piracy greater than international finance mobilised to solve the problem, we can expect piracy to increase geographically and in sophistication.

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.

Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved.

For a person who is dying only eternity counts.

I still don't have a publicist. If I'm in a film, you have an obligation to promote it, I'll do as much as I can.

Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.

I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.