Quotes from Michael Rosen

At around 16, I became obsessed with James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. I was absorbed by the sense of someone trying to break out of an institution but then became interested in Joyces experimental way of writing.

Cricket is great for families, so long as you don't play by the proper rules and adapt it so the youngest can be helped to stay doing the exciting stuff.

I was the youngest, and there was my mother, my father and my brother. They each had their own way of turning anything, from washing up an eggcup to a chase across the North York Moors to catch up with a train, into a comic account.

Politicians of all kinds think there's some running in talking tough about children's reading. They think that if they announce to the public that some kind of daily drilling on sounds and letters is to be brought in, the problem of children's reading will be solved.

When it comes to the UK, our problem is that weve never decolonised.

My father was adept at making up limericks about place names we encountered on holidays or others using the names of new people we met.

Performance poetry is not one genre. Some chant, sing and dance. Some stand rooted to the spot and stare. Some chat their way in and out of their poems like stand-ups. Some confess, some rage. Some play with words, some talk plain. The point is, it's live and in the moment.

Poetry on TV doesn't have to be like a newscast with someone staring blankly at the camera, pretending they're not reading from an autocue.

The starting point for English work must be the ability to handle effectively their own experience. Oral work, written work and the discussion of literature must create an atmosphere in which the pupils become confident of the full acceptability of the material of their own experience.

If you think you're living in an imperfect world, you can write a book about a better world and hope that enough of your readers will notice the difference between the two.

As I began to perform - songs, poems, sketches or conjuring tricks - I began to learn what children run with and what they dont. I discovered that, quite often, an element of surprise or absurdity might be the key to unlocking laughter.

The world is becoming increasingly changeable and unpredictable, so why should education make the knowledge being passed on so finite and certain; why divide all of it into measurable units?

I was very lucky to have been brought up in a household where my older brother and my father read out loud to me as a teenager. It was a form of conversation or entertainment.

Linguists have noticed that across the history of language some words start out as obvious, conscious metaphors and then slowly embed themselves in our daily usage in such a way that we're no longer aware that they are metaphors.

The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure.

Whether were parents, carers, teachers or anyone working with young children, we know that children move easily and often between free play and structured play. One is not better or worse than another, they each offer different experiences, different ways of thinking, and different kinds of learning.

Where the government has got it seriously wrong is to imagine that poetry is about right and wrong answers, that poetry has testable outcomes. It doesn't. Very nearly all poetry is full of ambiguity and suggestiveness.

I love rereading Shakespeare plays and Im constantly finding bits that Ive overlooked or not understood before.

Poetry fills clubs, halls and venues. Poets and poems can talk to the deepest feelings and to the silliest. It can be like stand-up or rock music. It can be intimate, it can be pubic.

Change in language is hard to capture and when it's visible or audible; it is also hard for some to accept.

This is me being sad.Maybe you think I'm being happy in this picture. Really I'm being sad but pretending I'm being happy. I'm doing that because I think people won't like me if I look sad.

I've seen after-school clubs where parents, teachers and children have got together to write books. They were in a mix of languages; the books told stories of what the parents got up to when they were children and how they arrived in the area, whether it was from another country or from the other side of town.

If you want to discover how to make children laugh - and I truly believe all adults should, because children need laughter - the best place to start is with your own childhood.

You can give up the best years of your life knowing that no matter what you do or how you do it, your step-child may not love you or want or need to have anything to do with you once they have left home.