Jill Paton Walsh Quotes

Being a writer usually entails a fairly quiet life. However much travel one might do, however many tours and appearances, the job entails solitude: long hours in libraries, long hours at a desk.

I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.

If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

One of my colleagues in Birmingham University, where I come from,' said Trevair, 'is a moral philosopher. He taught me that one of the ways to judge a course of action is to consider what company it puts one in. I doubt if that's very good philosophy, but I find it a good rule of thumb.

It's amazing [ ... ] how perfectly honest people who would starve rather than steal sixpence, will steal books without compunction.

[A]fter all, the position of a reader in a book is very like that occupied by angels in the world, when angels still had any credibility. Yours is, like theirs, a hovering, gravely attentive presence, observing everything, from whom nothing is concealed, for angels are very bright mirrors. Hearts and minds are as open as the landscape to their view, as to yours; like them you are in the fabled world invisible.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people ...

The protagonist of folktale is always, and intensely, a young person moving through ordeals into adult life ... and this is why there are no wicked stepchildren in the tales.

I honestly don't think Peter is that interesting without Harriet - the only exception being 'The Nine Tailors', which is such a good book it doesn't really matter whether he's got a consort or not.

You can't deduce the personality of the potter from the pots. It's a thingy you've made and offered to somebody else for their use, and, believe me, a novel is like that. It's a made thing and ought not to contain a direct self-expression of the writer.