MORRIS GLEITZMAN

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

I would never write stories with only despair and defeat and the dark side of life.

Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath.

I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle.

Step-parenting and being a step-sibling presents a lot of exciting opportunities. When families break up and re-form, there may be less order, less certainty, and a bit more trauma involved, but kids can end up having half-a-dozen parent figures.

Kid's culture is often dismissed as superficial, like high fibre McDonald's, but it's so much more important than that.

Children have limited power to shape their own lives, but when they can experiment with possibilities through books, their optimism can be recharged and kept alive.

At around nine or 10 years of age, young people start to decide for themselves what's moral or not, and that's why I like writing for that age group so much.

I want to help children develop strengths that allow them to feel they don't have to push things away mentally... If we 'cotton-ball' kids, it produces adults who are too scared to think for themselves and are easily manipulated.

I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.

My capacity for humour may have come largely from my father - he liked to entertain people, make people laugh.

I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.

Kids aren't political, but around 10 years old, they are beginning to develop the moral grounding that might later, in their teens, develop into their first real political perspectives.

Melbourne is my type of city, much more so than Sydney.

Boys, particularly, like stories where they can have images in their imagination, where they can go to scary places and experiment with what can happen.

I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens.

I prefer watching people on a screen, and I've had the most pleasurable people-watching experiences at the Palace Cinema in Balwyn.

I think, to be a successful author, you've got to be part recluse and part show-off.

When I did finally live in the Dandenongs, the mountain ash forests became an important part of my life.

I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness.

I think probably you can either write for kids, or you can't. That ability to imaginatively be a child and see the world as a child and feel and think like a child - you either have that ability or you don't.

I wrote stories as a kid just for myself. One day, some of the kids in my class found some of my stories in my bag, and I was deeply embarrassed until I realised they enjoyed reading them.

Halfway through primary school, I realised that I was not as physically strong or fearless as many kids. So, in situations of conflict, I quickly learned that it worked better for me to get out of situations or maybe kind of, you know, prevail in a conflict situation by using humour than by trying to punch somebody out.

In 1969, we emigrated to Australia. It was a big change. The heat, the flies, and the completely different tinned meats. The shock was so great, I stopped reading books for nearly a year.

Most of your life after puberty, you're either seeking to reproduce or living with the consequences of having done so. At 70, you start going back to being 11 again.