David Almond quotes:

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.

Themes around education and learning run through my work.

Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.

It was great to see the owls," I said.She smiled."Yes. They're wild things, of course. Killers, savages. They're wonderful.

A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world and making a difference.

This is our world. Aye, there's more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there's all this joy, Kit. There's all this lovely, lovely light.

It's always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

There's light and joy, but there's also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"I said nothing."What colour's a blackbird?" she said."Black""Typical!

I know I'm writing better now than I ever did for adults because I'm writing for an audience who know that they don't know everything.

The dead are often known to eat 27 and 53

Look at all the life in this, she said. Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity.I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers.Just imagine, she said. If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.We let the stars shine into us.

It's called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.'She looked up from her book.'I would hope, though,' she went on, 'that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don't you?' --Mina

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journy of exploration and discovery.

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled,

What are you?" I whispered. He shrugged again. "Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that.

We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel," she said. "They say they're where your wings will grow again one day.

We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.

Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems.

When you grow up", I said, "do you ever stop feeling little and weak?" "No," she says. "There's always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are.

Its always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units.

Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

I don't want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I'll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it's possible to be. I'm growing and I don't know how to grow. I'm living but I haven't started living yet.

Yes. But sad's alright. Sad's just apart of everything