Michael Rosen Quotes

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Michael Rosen

Profession : Author

Birth : May 7, 1946

Lists, and lists of lists, invite many questions and one that crops up here is: what makes a children's book last? When it's books for very young children, this is a matter that is almost entirely at the behest of adults - parents, teachers, critics, librarians.

Michael Rosen

A visit to a bookshop will be a difficult one if you're looking for any picture book in print that is more than 50 years old.

Michael Rosen

The wave of feeling that can overcome an adult when he or she opens a book that was read to them by a loved parent or teacher can be quite stunning.

Michael Rosen

Poetry fills clubs, halls and venues. Poets and poems can talk to the deepest feelings and to the silliest. It can be like stand-up or rock music. It can be intimate, it can be pubic.

Michael Rosen

Poetry on TV doesn't have to be like a newscast with someone staring blankly at the camera, pretending they're not reading from an autocue.

Michael Rosen

Yes, it's possible to play computer games on your own and many do. But I also see children playing them in pairs and fours for hours on end and the air is full of talk and banter.

Michael Rosen

Poetry has never been written with the intention of making young people irritated, bored, anxious or humiliated, and yet the consequence of the test and exam system often does just that.

Michael Rosen

There's no one right way to teach poetry in schools.

Michael Rosen

What happens on the ground is that schools have been required to follow a literacy matrix - yes, some schools junked it - but most schools follow it. This matrix determined what children have to study and when.

Michael Rosen

When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how it works, how it's constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry's method, poetry's way of looking at things.

Michael Rosen

Where the government has got it seriously wrong is to imagine that poetry is about right and wrong answers, that poetry has testable outcomes. It doesn't. Very nearly all poetry is full of ambiguity and suggestiveness.

Michael Rosen

Politicians of all kinds think there's some running in talking tough about children's reading. They think that if they announce to the public that some kind of daily drilling on sounds and letters is to be brought in, the problem of children's reading will be solved.

Michael Rosen

The main problem with people not reading to their children is the lack of a bridge between schools and families, so that children don't see books and learning as a separate part of life.

Michael Rosen

People always imagine that the whole of Victorian England was sitting around reading Alice in Wonderland - in fact only a tiny minority ever did.

Michael Rosen

The brothers Grimm were indeed once read by millions of people - quite often the first reading materials given to people in the 1950s were their tales.

Michael Rosen

My main motive for going into children's literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I imagine I'm returning the favour.

Michael Rosen

I think of children's books as not so much for children, but as the filling that goes between the child world and the adult world.

Michael Rosen

A very important part of writing for children is appearing at book festivals, and in libraries and schools. An important part of becoming a writer for children is seeing what published writers do and say when they appear.

Michael Rosen

We know that the ability to take on complex ideas, to handle the notion of a multiplicity of viewpoints, to deal in abstract thought relies on a person's experience of reading widely and often - in combination with open-ended but challenging discussion.

Michael Rosen

If we are serious about enabling those who want to acquire what we have called standard English then first we should be honest about change and its lack of encoded rules. Then, together with them, we should look closely at how such people's speech and writing diverges from the kind of English that they would like to acquire.

Michael Rosen