Kevin Crossley-Holland Quotes

#1. Lif and Lifthrasir will have children. Their children will have children.
There will be life and new life, life everywhere on earth. That was the end; and this is the beginning.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#2. I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#3. You can teach someone a skill but you can't teach them spirit.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#4. There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#5. When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#6. Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#7. That's what happens when you're really concentrating. Time stands still. Time flies!

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#8. A culture finds the gods it needs.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#9. I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#10. Because you know something won't ever happen, it doesn't stop you longing for it.
I know I'll never be able to speak or sing with my own voice.
I don't know why.
I wish I did.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#11. Fearlessness is better than a faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#12. Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#13. Like any decent researcher, I throw away 90% of my research.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#14. Think of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.' It is equally intoxicating for children and adults. All this 'crossover' talk is something publishers are using as a selling device - a kind of post hoc rationalisation of what was happening already.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#15. Everything, I thought, everything keeps changing. Changing shape, changing colour, changing sound.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#16. Maybe if I ever come to write about my teens and adulthood - and I can't imagine I will - but if I do, then maybe I will want to say a bit more about the ways in which my parents' relationship with one another impacted on me in later years.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#17. Most writers, by the time they're 60, must have revisited their childhood a dozen times.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#18. For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#19. Some things in our lives, we think about, we hope for, we dream of, we half believe. But some we just know. And what I know, Laura, is that if you practise and learn to play this instrument, the day will come when angels stop and listen to you.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#20. The rivers that sprang from Hvergelmir streamed into the void. The yeasty venom in them thickened and congealed like slag, and the rivers turned into ice.

Kevin Crossley-Holland