P. L. Travers
P. L. Travers
Pamela Lyndon Travers, OBEwas an Australian-born British novelist, actress, and journalist who emigrated to England and lived most of her adult life there. She is known best for the Mary Poppins series of children's books featuring the magical English nanny Mary Poppins...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth9 August 1899
CountryAustralia
dog men views
I've felt that if I just used initials nobody would know whether I was a man or a woman, a dog or a tiger. I could hide from view, like a bat on the underside of a branch.
children sea swim
When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.
thinking ideas window
I think the idea of Mary Poppins has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
thinking needs film
I think that Mary Poppins needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.
rooms world my-own
I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.
ask-me asks
You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.
bird flying stories
Stories are like birds flying, here and gone in a moment.
tree want cherries
If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.
teacher children book
I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.
life caring hug
And all the time he was enjoying his badness, hugging it to him as though it were a friend, and not caring a bit.
fate stories accepted
Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.
stars moving bird
The same substance composes us--the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star--we are all one, all moving to the same end.
children book maturity
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 .
hero blood names
The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories.