Jill Paton Walsh Quotes

#1. It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people ...

Jill Paton Walsh

#2. There's no point in using someone else's characters if you're going to turn them into your own vision. You have to be loyal to that person's worldview and sensitive to what they would and wouldn't have done with their characters, and how explicit or inexplicit they would've been.

Jill Paton Walsh

#3. If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

Jill Paton Walsh

#4. One of my colleagues in Birmingham University, where I come from,' said Trevair, 'is a moral philosopher. He taught me that one of the ways to judge a course of action is to consider what company it puts one in. I doubt if that's very good philosophy, but I find it a good rule of thumb.

Jill Paton Walsh

#5. Meanwhile, we stooped and picked the sharp plants,

Jill Paton Walsh

#6. My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

Jill Paton Walsh

#7. You can't deduce the personality of the potter from the pots. It's a thingy you've made and offered to somebody else for their use, and, believe me, a novel is like that. It's a made thing and ought not to contain a direct self-expression of the writer.

Jill Paton Walsh

#8. I honestly don't think Peter is that interesting without Harriet - the only exception being 'The Nine Tailors', which is such a good book it doesn't really matter whether he's got a consort or not.

Jill Paton Walsh

#9. If you want to express yourself, you need the services of a lover or a psychiatrist; if you want to express a book, you might conceivably manage it.

Jill Paton Walsh

#10. The protagonist of folktale is always, and intensely, a young person moving through ordeals into adult life ... and this is why there are no wicked stepchildren in the tales.

Jill Paton Walsh

#11. And may God better understand and love us, than we, in our weakness, can do him.

Jill Paton Walsh

#12. Being a writer usually entails a fairly quiet life. However much travel one might do, however many tours and appearances, the job entails solitude: long hours in libraries, long hours at a desk.

Jill Paton Walsh

#13. Bunter came with me in the role of a friend. A role he has always played to perfection."
"It does not require dissimulation, my lord," said Bunter.
"Thank you," said Peter.

Jill Paton Walsh

#14. It's amazing [ ... ] how perfectly honest people who would starve rather than steal sixpence, will steal books without compunction.

Jill Paton Walsh

#15. Granted, a man may smile and smile and be a villain, but it takes nerve.

Jill Paton Walsh

#16. I think that novels are tools of thought. They are moral philosophy with the theory left out, with just the examples of the moral situations left standing.

Jill Paton Walsh