John Lee Hancock Quotes

I love Roald Dahl.

The most irritating movie character for me was that cradle-to-grave commie, Mary Poppins.

Every generation comes upon the movie again, and then, invariably, the books have a spike in sales because people want to read more about Mary Poppins.

As far as fiction goes, as far as everything from Dr. Seuss to Oscar Wilde to Bret Easton Ellis. Ray Bradbury. There's just tons of stuff that I love. Neil Gaiman!

I loved the 'Chronicles of Narnia.'

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them.

I'm a huge fan of Beverly Cleary.

I loved 'A Lion in the Meadow' by Margaret Mahy.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

Dahl was my favorite author as a child. When I got older, I discovered his adult stories and fell even more in love with him.

I still know the lyrics to pretty much any 'Mary Poppins' song.

I'm the author of several books, including children's books.

Whenever I was encouraged by my elders to pick up a book, I was often told, 'Read so as to know the world.' And it is true; books have invited me into different countries, states of mind, social conditions and historical epochs; they have offered me a place at the most unusual gatherings.

I always wanted to write for children. When I was growing up, we were really poor. My mother had left, and it was all a mess. So I lived in my head a lot, and I would get lots of books for Christmas - from librarians and teachers - and they just fed my imagination.

I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.

A lot of school-going children are familiar with my writing. I am basically very much a children books author.

I've always been excited to know how we got here.

It is important for us to understand where we came from and how we got here because it would be very foolish of us to get off that horse we rode in on.

I'm a massive Roald Dahl fan. I grew up reading his work and see a recurring theme - I have continued to love stuff that mixes the gruesome with a sort of humour. I'm drawn to that in my work.

Frankly, the British always looked at this as a dumpy industrial area, but this was where Shakespeare lived and wrote and performed some of his greatest works.

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

If one is going to offer children stories that underneath the story must be something that will inform, stimulate and guide, I love to be on board. I think anything that resonates with history, as does The Jungle Book and Watership Down, reflects patterns of behavior, power struggles, deprivation, migration, survival, joy, love, betrayal, and all of these things. It's tragic that children are encouraged to ignore history. We ignore history and any literature that is historically based in history. Even though both of those films involved animals, of course they reflect human behavior.