Quotes from P. L. Travers

I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.

I've felt that if I just used initials nobody would know whether I was a man or a woman, a dog or a tiger. I could hide from view, like a bat on the underside of a branch.

My father died when I was 7. I was his favorite child, and he was my beloved father. I brought him along with me all through my life. Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me.

'Friend Monkey' is really my favorite of all my books because the Hindu myth on which it is based is my favorite - the myth of the Monkey Lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went.

And all the time he was enjoying his badness, hugging it to him as though it were a friend, and not caring a bit.

I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.

I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.

When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.

Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for - if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.

For me, there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.