P. L. Travers

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

I never wrote my books especially for children.

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.

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

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.

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.

I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.

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.

'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.

My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.

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

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.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

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.