But Nightshirts aren't dangerous," Pippi assured her. "They don't bite anybody except in self defense.

Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself.

Don't let them get you down. Be cheeky. And wild. And wonderful.

Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody’s imagination.

What the world of tomorrow will be like is greatly dependent on the power of imagination in those who are learning to read today.

There is very little you can beat into a child, but no limit to what you can hug out of it.

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

I don't mind dying, I'll gladly do that, but not right now, I need to clean the house first.

If I have brightened up one single sad childhood, then I have at least accomplished something in my life.

I don't want to write for adults. I want to write for readers who can perform miracles. Only children perform miracles when they read.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

Don’t wait for a genie to grant your wishes. That power is yours.

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

The songwriters whom we think of being the greatest songwriters usually write one hit and six or seven flops.

Man has risen so far above all other species that he competes in ways unique in nature. He fights by means of complicated weapons; he fights for ends remote in time.

When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.

I've always been a clown trapped in a leading man's body.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

Dali likes me taking his picture because he is interested in pictures that do not simply reproduce reality. Even in photos he prefers to appear outside reality .That is surrealistic!

I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.