Michael Rosen Quotes

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Michael Rosen

Profession : Author

Birth : May 7, 1946

The world of children's books is a very friendly, decent place to be. It's full of people who are desperate to enlighten, interest and excite children in ideas, imaginary worlds and contemporary issues.

Michael Rosen

We've all been children, we all know a parent or parent-figure. This makes us all potential writers of children's books.

Michael Rosen

We need all people, everyone, to think for themselves, to think critically, to think abstractly, to develop their powers of empathy.

Michael Rosen

You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.

Michael Rosen

My parents bookshelves were full of books that belonged to their lives in the Communist party.

Michael Rosen

Anxiety about the possibility that children will be corrupted if they hear rude words has been around for a long time.

Michael Rosen

I was very lucky to have been brought up in a household where my older brother and my father read out loud to me as a teenager. It was a form of conversation or entertainment.

Michael Rosen

Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.

Michael Rosen

When I was about 15 - that would be some 60 years ago - I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.

Michael Rosen

Ive lived in London all my life. There are some parts of London where a high percentage of people are on the bottom level of incomes. Treating such people as privileged is absurd and insulting.

Michael Rosen

At around 16, I became obsessed with James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. I was absorbed by the sense of someone trying to break out of an institution but then became interested in Joyces experimental way of writing.

Michael Rosen

Books for children get into schools. Committed teachers use books like mine alongside films, non-fiction and fiction to help children investigate and understand the Holocaust, persecution and genocide.

Michael Rosen

Performance poetry is not one genre. Some chant, sing and dance. Some stand rooted to the spot and stare. Some chat their way in and out of their poems like stand-ups. Some confess, some rage. Some play with words, some talk plain. The point is, it's live and in the moment.

Michael Rosen

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

Michael Rosen

The word 'family' has always posed great difficulties. Until recently, high death rates for women in labour meant many stepmothers and, according to folklore, most of them wicked. After two world wars, we lost many fathers, and single- and step-parenting emerged from the rubble.

Michael Rosen

It seems that 17% of men born since 1970 are step-fathers. Of course it is not new: my father's cousin, nearly 96, stepfathered two, while his wife stepmothered one. My own father, 85, has stepfathered three and I, at 58, have stepfathered two. What is new is that stepfathering is climbing fast.

Michael Rosen

On the rare occasions that men talk to each other about these things, we discover that step-fathering a child whose father has died is very different again from the experience of trying to do it with a child whose father is alive but not on the scene, and that is different from the situation where the biological father is around sometimes.

Michael Rosen

The walk between our house and the bus stop is marked by decay and wreckage. A row of shops, flats, community centres and an old cinema is boarded up, burned out, cracking and rotting.

Michael Rosen

I've seen after-school clubs where parents, teachers and children have got together to write books. They were in a mix of languages; the books told stories of what the parents got up to when they were children and how they arrived in the area, whether it was from another country or from the other side of town.

Michael Rosen

If you think you're living in an imperfect world, you can write a book about a better world and hope that enough of your readers will notice the difference between the two.

Michael Rosen