Michael Morpurgo Quotes

Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times, and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?

...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.

I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.

Whether that's questioning the dominant opinion of the day, the conventional wisdom of the day, or whether it's questioning the policies that come out of Washington, or out of our government, generally, I think media's job is to look at it and say, "What's really going on here? What's the story behind what you see?"

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

I don't think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great - just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

We can read the paper or current magazines and learn about national and world events, think about controversial subjects, learn how to disagree respectfully, and how, finally, to act on our convictions. We can read for pure delight, and if we do this as a family or classroom or other group we can build wonderful memories.

My deep religiosity [...] found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.