Michael Rosen Quotes

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Michael Rosen

Profession : Author

Birth : May 7, 1946

If schools don't make books important then children who come from homes with no books, and who don't visit libraries, will never find their way into this vital way of presenting ideas, feelings and knowledge.

Michael Rosen

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

Michael Rosen

Death is shot through with the details and colours of the lives that were lived.

Michael Rosen

I think the best learning takes place when you create an atmosphere of curiosity and excitement.

Michael Rosen

The parents who read with their children and fill their houses with books produce the highest achievers.

Michael Rosen

The first pages of any book I remember reading, in Pinner Wood primary school, were from The Beacon Readers: stories of Farmer Giles, Rover the Dog, Old Lob the shepherd and Mrs Cuddy the Cow. I was very fond of Mrs Cuddy.

Michael Rosen

Education is all about making sure that the next generation know what our representatives think they should know.

Michael Rosen

The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure.

Michael Rosen

I love rereading Shakespeare plays and Im constantly finding bits that Ive overlooked or not understood before.

Michael Rosen

You can give up the best years of your life knowing that no matter what you do or how you do it, your step-child may not love you or want or need to have anything to do with you once they have left home.

Michael Rosen

Cricket is great for families, so long as you don't play by the proper rules and adapt it so the youngest can be helped to stay doing the exciting stuff.

Michael Rosen

The arts investigate the properties of the world by playing with materials - such as stone, paint, fabric, synthetic substances, the human body, the human voice and of course language.

Michael Rosen

I understand that more and more children under the age of 10 go to bed without having something read to them or reading something themselves. Instead, there are more and more TVs in children's bedrooms and they are going to sleep watching TV.

Michael Rosen

I was the youngest, and there was my mother, my father and my brother. They each had their own way of turning anything, from washing up an eggcup to a chase across the North York Moors to catch up with a train, into a comic account.

Michael Rosen

Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often.

Michael Rosen

Im generally of the view that we should know the names of those who enacted and justified imperial power - but only if the glorifying can be supplemented with plaques that tell us the shameful histories of, for example active participation in the slave trade or highly successful and profitable lives extracted from slave plantations.

Michael Rosen

I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

Michael Rosen

My own view is that the arts are neither superior nor inferior to anything else that goes on in schools.

Michael Rosen

The way to take the arts seriously is not to defend this or that art form for its own sake. Pursuing arts activities with humane and democratic principles in mind is where the benefit lies.

Michael Rosen

Whether were parents, carers, teachers or anyone working with young children, we know that children move easily and often between free play and structured play. One is not better or worse than another, they each offer different experiences, different ways of thinking, and different kinds of learning.

Michael Rosen