P. L. Travers Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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.”

“I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.”

“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.”

“'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.”

“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 never wrote my books especially for children.”

“Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.”

“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.”