P. L. Travers

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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