Quotes from David Almond

Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?" "No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are.

I said, 'Do you know what shoulder blades are for?' She giggled. 'Do you not even know that?' she said. 'Do you?' 'It's a proven fact, common knowledge. They're where your wings were, and where they'll grow again.

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails. We let the stars shine into us.

Sometimes children must be left alone to be still and silent, and to do.

This might be heaven! We might be living in heaven right now! And we might be the angels!

Yes. But sad's alright. Sad's just apart of everything

Themes around education and learning run through my work.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems.

It's always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units.

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

maybe one day we all had wings and one day we'll all have wings again. D'you think the baby had wings? Oh, I'm sure that one had wings. Just got to take one look at her. Sometimes I think she's never quite left Heaven and never quite made it all the way here to Earth. She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes. Maybe that's why she has such trouble staying here, she said.

We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.

It was great to see the owls, I said. She smiled. Yes. They're wild things, of course. Killers, savages. They're wonderful.

Look at the earth and you think it's solid, he said. But look deeper and you'll see it's riddled with tunnels. A warren. A labyrinth.

You've got all these weird forces in you, but you feel unsatisfied, empty, unfinished. You feel like everything that matters is a million miles and a million years away, and yes it might come to you but no it bliddy mightn't. It'll be like an unreachable constellation of the stars. And nothing will happen, ever. And you'll never be anything, ever.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled. --Mina

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, Where did you come from? How did you get here? And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.

Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad. I turn my face towards it and I laugh. Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad. I laugh again. Some people think that she's already mad, I think.

It happened so long ago I can't even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.

Being young is like being mad. Maybe just being human, at any age, is a bit like being mad. But Maybe the best thing that we do, and the best thing that we are, come from madness.

What is the purpose of living if there are no perils to be encountered and overcome?

Live an adventure. Live like you're in a story.