Top 60 Michael Rosen Quotes

When territories were settled or invaded by force, the colonisers frequently used names of European monarchs, leaders and the military as part of their settlement. The number of Victorias all over the world are one testimony to that.

My own view is that the arts are neither superior nor inferior to anything else that goes on in schools.

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.

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

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.

The walk between our house and the bus stop is marked by decay and wreckage. A row of shops, flats, community centres and an old cinema is boarded up, burned out, cracking and rotting.

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.

Anxiety about the possibility that children will be corrupted if they hear rude words has been around for a long time.

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.

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?

We have an almost complete comprehensive primary school system in England. Surely, if grammar schools are some kind of answer to making education better for children over the age of 11, it would be the answer for children under the age of 11.

There’s no one right way to teach poetry in schools.

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.

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.

Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through ‘synthetic phonics’ and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sounds tough and purposeful.

A very important part of writing for children is appearing at book festivals, and in libraries and schools. An important part of becoming a writer for children is seeing what published writers do and say when they appear.

The way to take the arts seriously is not to defend this or that art form for its own sake. Pursuing arts activities with humane and democratic principles in mind is where the benefit lies.

Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.

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.

Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world.

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.

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.

Anyway, once children get to talk, they seem to be finding ways to joke.

The whole of Sheffield seems to be crazy about books. There are festivals and their own book awards, and their own children’s book conferences for teachers and librarians.

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

Its social: in doing the arts we find out what we need from each other. But its also about survival – surviving as individuals, as groups, but also as the human race.

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.

We’ve all been children, we all know a parent or parent-figure. This makes us all potential writers of children’s books.

When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it’s really happened.

Death is shot through with the details and colours of the lives that were lived.

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

My parents bookshelves were full of books that belonged to their lives in the Communist party.

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.

I think the best learning takes place when you create an atmosphere of curiosity and excitement.

A visit to a bookshop will be a difficult one if you’re looking for any picture book in print that is more than 50 years old.

I think of children’s books as not so much for children, but as the filling that goes between the child world and the adult world.

The main problem with people not reading to their children is the lack of a bridge between schools and families, so that children don’t see books and learning as a separate part of life.

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.

I can’t think of how many meetings I’ve sat through where people have explained that language has become less important because we now live in a visual age.

If you find yourself caring about old stories and regret the ways in which they slip out of reach of young audiences, you may well conjure up the means to put these tales into young peoples imaginations.

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.

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.

Books for children get into schools. Committed teachers use books like mine alongside films, non-fiction and fiction to help children investigate and understand the Holocaust, persecution and genocide.

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed – and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

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.

One of the reasons we invented continuous prose was to lay out an argument, piling points on top of each other, weighing one view against another, even to invite the reader to look back at something earlier or later in a book.

The brothers Grimm were indeed once read by millions of people – quite often the first reading materials given to people in the 1950s were their tales.

In the mid-1970s I worked at Vauxhall Manor school, a girls comprehensive in south London.

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.

Social groups in society don’t swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.

There should be room in education for schooling to be more responsive to events, more focused on varying interpretations and more able to create artistic and technological responses to the world as it changes.

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

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.

We need all people, everyone, to think for themselves, to think critically, to think abstractly, to develop their powers of empathy.

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.

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

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.

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.