Quotes from Michael Rosen

Anxiety about the possibility that children will be corrupted if they hear rude words has been around for a long time.

It seems that 17% of men born since 1970 are step-fathers. Of course it is not new: my father's cousin, nearly 96, stepfathered two, while his wife stepmothered one. My own father, 85, has stepfathered three and I, at 58, have stepfathered two. What is new is that stepfathering is climbing fast.

I think the best learning takes place when you create an atmosphere of curiosity and excitement.

The brothers Grimm were indeed once read by millions of people - quite often the first reading materials given to people in the 1950s were their tales.

If you find yourself caring about old stories and regret the ways in which they slip out of reach of young audiences, you may well conjure up the means to put these tales into young peoples imaginations.

One of the reasons we invented continuous prose was to lay out an argument, piling points on top of each other, weighing one view against another, even to invite the reader to look back at something earlier or later in a book.

We need all people, everyone, to think for themselves, to think critically, to think abstractly, to develop their powers of empathy.

Death is shot through with the details and colours of the lives that were lived.

When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it's really happened.

Any encounter, any situation in which there was a confrontation between us as children and our own parents, or teachers, when we did something daft, can arouse amazement and delight in our children. Theres something wonderful about knowing that our own parents were fallible.

There should be room in education for schooling to be more responsive to events, more focused on varying interpretations and more able to create artistic and technological responses to the world as it changes.

Im generally of the view that we should know the names of those who enacted and justified imperial power - but only if the glorifying can be supplemented with plaques that tell us the shameful histories of, for example active participation in the slave trade or highly successful and profitable lives extracted from slave plantations.

The way we speak is very different from the way we write - especially from the way we write continuous prose.

The whole of Sheffield seems to be crazy about books. There are festivals and their own book awards, and their own children's book conferences for teachers and librarians.

I think of children's books as not so much for children, but as the filling that goes between the child world and the adult world.

The word 'family' has always posed great difficulties. Until recently, high death rates for women in labour meant many stepmothers and, according to folklore, most of them wicked. After two world wars, we lost many fathers, and single- and step-parenting emerged from the rubble.

Any child who reads widely, often and for pleasure will inevitably make comparisons between what they're reading, why they're reading and how they're reading.

We know that the ability to take on complex ideas, to handle the notion of a multiplicity of viewpoints, to deal in abstract thought relies on a person's experience of reading widely and often - in combination with open-ended but challenging discussion.

When territories were settled or invaded by force, the colonisers frequently used names of European monarchs, leaders and the military as part of their settlement. The number of Victorias all over the world are one testimony to that.

A very important part of writing for children is appearing at book festivals, and in libraries and schools. An important part of becoming a writer for children is seeing what published writers do and say when they appear.

A society based on a market economy which decided that people should only be allowed to take up senior positions in business, administration and the professions purely on merit would have to abolish the main mechanisms for taking up the top positions in society: inherited wealth, tax havens and private education.

The way to take the arts seriously is not to defend this or that art form for its own sake. Pursuing arts activities with humane and democratic principles in mind is where the benefit lies.

The walk between our house and the bus stop is marked by decay and wreckage. A row of shops, flats, community centres and an old cinema is boarded up, burned out, cracking and rotting.

In most countries, property law means that people can take possession of manuscripts and, in some circumstances, a lone copy of a printed text. In these cases where only one copy of the work exists the owners of the manuscript also find themselves in possession of its literature. Yet the two things ought not to be conflated.