Quotes from Michael Rosen

A Christmas Carol' is one of a few literary works that can be cited as a common cultural reference point, so its a text people imagine theyve read without having done so.

I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

On the rare occasions that men talk to each other about these things, we discover that step-fathering a child whose father has died is very different again from the experience of trying to do it with a child whose father is alive but not on the scene, and that is different from the situation where the biological father is around sometimes.

The parents who read with their children and fill their houses with books produce the highest achievers.

If you say to teachers, how can we, with the resources we've got here, develop a policy on reading books, then within minutes, people have ideas, make plans, invent activities.

People always imagine that the whole of Victorian England was sitting around reading Alice in Wonderland - in fact only a tiny minority ever did.

The first pages of any book I remember reading, in Pinner Wood primary school, were from The Beacon Readers: stories of Farmer Giles, Rover the Dog, Old Lob the shepherd and Mrs Cuddy the Cow. I was very fond of Mrs Cuddy.

The sentimentalist in me loves it when the important things we say and do can be tied to buildings and landscape.

My main motive for going into children's literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I imagine I'm returning the favour.

One of the many falsities of fiction that we accept quite happily is the non-ageing of characters as they appear across series and sequels.

Writing limericks gives us a playground, a release from these conventions.

The empty room of someone who has gone to college, or is on holiday, is not much different from someone who has just died. We live in rooms. Then we don't.

Books are low-tech, portable packages of the widest range of human experience, presented in a format which gives time to grasp complex ideas or to spend time in imaginative worlds.

The world of children's books is a very friendly, decent place to be. It's full of people who are desperate to enlighten, interest and excite children in ideas, imaginary worlds and contemporary issues.

Education is all about making sure that the next generation know what our representatives think they should know.

What's difficult to do in books for children is to create funny incidents. Funny images, funny language and any kind of taboo-breaking is not difficult.

Across the many years I've been involved with arts education, I have seen countless projects, schemes, partnerships and programmes, on and off site, being developed, flowering and then getting phased out.

Lists, and lists of lists, invite many questions and one that crops up here is: what makes a children's book last? When it's books for very young children, this is a matter that is almost entirely at the behest of adults - parents, teachers, critics, librarians.

Poetry has never been written with the intention of making young people irritated, bored, anxious or humiliated, and yet the consequence of the test and exam system often does just that.

Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often.

What happens on the ground is that schools have been required to follow a literacy matrix - yes, some schools junked it - but most schools follow it. This matrix determined what children have to study and when.

Ive lived in London all my life. There are some parts of London where a high percentage of people are on the bottom level of incomes. Treating such people as privileged is absurd and insulting.

I think grammar teaching should start with real examples of language in use: journalism, fiction, songs, ads, instructions, headlines, transcripts of conversations and so on.

When I was about 15 - that would be some 60 years ago - I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.