Top 100 Morpurgo's Quotes
#1. As ever, Morpurgo's warmth and humanity suffuse a story of courage, love and hope.
Amanda Craig
#2. I knew the story of 'War Horse' very well. I had read the book even before I did the auditions. I'm a big fan of Michael Morpurgo.
Celine Buckens
#3. And then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.
Michael Morpurgo
#4. If I learned anything in this life, I've learned that you can't cling on.
Michael Morpurgo
#5. I was brought up, as a lot of kids are, on 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Brothers Grimm,' 'La Fontaine,' all those sorts of things. Hans Christian Andersen is a hero of mine.
Michael Morpurgo
#6. War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.
Michael Morpurgo
#7. Good experiences give us happiness but bad experiences teach us good lessons
Michael Morpurgo
#8. Life must not be spent always hoping, always waiting. Life is for living. -Kensuke
Michael Morpurgo
#9. When I was growing up in the Forties and Fifties, you could hide your children from the difficulties of life, but today you can't separate children's contact with the adult world today.
Michael Morpurgo
#10. It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.
Michael Morpurgo
#11. I really can't write fantasy. I cannot invent a world which does not exist. And I can't read fantasy either. As soon as I realise I'm reading a book that hasn't got its roots in a reality I can comprehend, I switch off.
Michael Morpurgo
#12. If it is possible to be happy in the middle of a nightmare, then Topthorn and I were happy that summer.
Michael Morpurgo
#13. To write something you have to feel it and know it, and that's not comfortable.
Michael Morpurgo
#14. There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?
Michael Morpurgo
#15. My Albert married his Maisie Brown as he said he would. But I think she never took to me, nor I to her for that matter. Perhaps it was a feeling of mutual jealousy.
Michael Morpurgo
#16. Being his real brother I could feel I live in his shadows, but I never have and I do not now. I live in his glow.
Michael Morpurgo
#17. Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don't try to trip you up ... they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do ... if they've loved a story they love to know how it started.
Michael Morpurgo
#18. It's no good wishing for the impossible. Don't wish. Remember. Remembrances are real.
Michael Morpurgo
#19. I am a story as well as a happening, and I want my story to be known,
Michael Morpurgo
#20. We're much alike, bee, you and me," I said. "You may carry your pack underneath you and your rifle may stick out of your bottom. But you and me, bee, are much alike.
Michael Morpurgo
#21. They fight a war and they don't know what for. Isn't that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different color uniform and speaks a different language?
Michael Morpurgo
#22. One day," she told us, "you'll have to leave here and go out into the big world out there and earn your living like everyone else. To do that you need to learn. The more you learn now, the more interesting your life will be.
Michael Morpurgo
#23. It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.
Michael Morpurgo
#24. But try as I might, I never got to eat any of her pastries, and do you know, she never even offered me one.
Michael Morpurgo
#25. By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.
Michael Morpurgo
#26. Sometimes," said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, "dreams are all that separate us from the machines.
Dan Simmons
#27. Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at all times.
Michael Morpurgo
#28. Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and most necessary steps in education and librarians, teachers and parents all over the country know it. It is our children's right and it is also our best hope and their best hope for the future.
Michael Morpurgo
#29. You get to about 65 or 70 and you lose friends and the world does seem to be an endlessly difficult place and tragic place, so it's more and more difficult for me to find the bright lights.
Michael Morpurgo
#30. I was never a great reader, but there were two stories I loved best: Kipling's 'The Elephant's Child' and 'The Jungle Book.' Deep down, I've always wanted to write a book about a wild child and an elephant.
Michael Morpurgo
#32. Always waiting, waiting to go up to the front line, waiting in the trenches with the whizzbags and shells bursting all around you, waiting for the whistle to send you out over the top and across No-Man's-Land, waiting for the bullet that had name on it.
Michael Morpurgo
#33. There's room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world - that's what I think.
Michael Morpurgo
#34. Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children. It's not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.
Michael Morpurgo
#35. Tonight, I want very much to believe that there's a heaven, that death is not a full stop, and that we will all see one another again.
Michael Morpurgo
#36. It's the teacher that makes the difference, not the classroom.
Michael Morpurgo
#37. Any problem can be solved between people if only they can trust each other
Michael Morpurgo
#38. That's what this war is all about, my friend. It's about which of us is the crazier.And clearly you British have an advantage.You were crazy beforehand.
Michael Morpurgo
#39. Marry someone who flatters you. Because I've written 80 books since 'War Horse' but when my wife reads one, all she says is, 'It's quite good, but it's not as good as 'War Horse,' is it?'
Michael Morpurgo
#41. Don't worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.
Michael Morpurgo
#42. Something I learn every time I stand in front of a bunch of children, I learn never, never to underestimate them or patronise them.
Michael Morpurgo
#43. To me soldiers had appeared to become younger as the war went on, and Rudy was no exception to this [ ... ]. And like so many of them now he looked, without his helmet, like a child dressed up as a soldier.
Michael Morpurgo
#44. I was an overly young father, is the most polite way of putting it. I think I was rather immature and all I can say is that I think I've made a much better grandfather ... I don't think I was ready to be a father to be honest.
Michael Morpurgo
#45. Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
Michael Morpurgo
#46. You have to understand the sea, he said, to listen to her, to look out for her moods, to get to know her and respect her and love her. Only then can you build boats that feel at home on the sea.
Michael Morpurgo
#47. It is the child's understanding that teaches the adults the way of the future. They're still doing it today with modern technology.
Michael Morpurgo
#48. Books that kids read should be about what is going on in the world.
Michael Morpurgo
#49. When I sit down I write very fast ... if I haven't finished a book in two or three months then I think it's not going well.
Michael Morpurgo
#52. I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.
Michael Morpurgo
#53. Wars become history all too soon and are forgotten all too soon as well, before the lessons can be learned.
Michael Morpurgo
#54. Admitting failure is quite cleansing, but never - pleasurable.
Michael Morpurgo
#55. We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff.'
Michael Morpurgo
#56. With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.
Michael Morpurgo
#57. Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.
Michael Morpurgo
#58. When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.
Michael Morpurgo
#59. With all editing, no matter how sensitive - and I've been very lucky here - I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.
Michael Morpurgo
#60. Why does this war have to destroy anything and everything that's fine and beautiful?
Michael Morpurgo
#61. That's what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don't tell her. You have to remember always that she's the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.
Michael Morpurgo
#63. There's a mouse in here with me. He's sitting there in the light of the lamp, looking up at me. He seems as surprised to see me as I am to see him. There he goes. I can hear him still, scurrying about somewhere under the hayrick. I think he's gone now. I hope he comes back. I miss him already.
Michael Morpurgo
#64. When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.
Michael Morpurgo
#65. As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.
Michael Morpurgo
#66. I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.
Michael Morpurgo
#67. Eagles are extinct," grumbled Morpurgo. "Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.
Dan Simmons
#68. A lot of children, like I did, move away from words because of the fear - which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you'll get, detention, worrying about letting people down, your parents, teachers.
Michael Morpurgo
#69. We fought back with our music; it was the only weapon we had.
Michael Morpurgo
#70. I was rather a poor student, too easily distracted - did a lot of gazing out of windows, fine for training to be a writer, but not a great way to achieve in the classroom. The truth is that I was happy to bumble along and do enough to avoid detention, but not much more.
Michael Morpurgo
#71. When you're young you can't work out the age of an adult - they're just quite old, old, or very old.
Michael Morpurgo
#72. Animals are sentient, intelligent, perceptive, funny and entertaining. We owe them a duty of care as we do to children.
Michael Morpurgo
#73. The most important thing is to live an interesting life. Keep your eyes, ears and heart open. Talk to people and visit interesting places, and don't forget to ask questions. To be a writer you need to drink in the world around you so it's always there in your head.
Michael Morpurgo
#74. that was the only way of keeping our hopes alive, by looking beyond all we were seeing around us, and the shadow of disaster that hung over us.
Michael Morpurgo
#75. But I didn't dare. That has always been my trouble. I've never dared enough.
Michael Morpurgo
#76. The big relationships you make in your life are with those that you love and if things do go wrong then it's a source of great pain and that lasts.
Michael Morpurgo
#77. Wherever my story takes me, however dark and difficult the theme, there is always some hope and redemption, not because readers like happy endings, but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in the morning, that there is a light at the end of every tunnel.
Michael Morpurgo
#78. But just as soon as this war's over and finished with,I'll get back home and marry her.I've grown up with her, Joey, known her all my life. S'pose I know her almost as well as I know myself, and I like her a lot better.
Michael Morpurgo
#79. After this night is over, then you can drift away, they you can sleep for ever, for nothing will ever matter again.
Michael Morpurgo
#80. I'm still not sure I want to be a writer. I think of myself as a storyteller more.
Michael Morpurgo
#81. Genuinely good people are like that. The sun shines out of them. They warm you right through.
Michael Morpurgo
#83. A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
Michael Morpurgo
#84. It's what I'll be singing in the morning. It won't be God Save the Ruddy King or All Things bleeding Bright and Beautiful. It'll be Orange and Lemons for Big Joe, for all of us.
Michael Morpurgo
#85. I think there's something about studying a book which will kill it if you're not careful.
Michael Morpurgo
#87. kind, to gaze in triumph at his gory head. So, remembering all this, let us all rejoice and feast together tonight. And in the morning I shall give you all your promised treasure.
Michael Morpurgo
#88. Encouraging young people to believe in themselves and find their own voice whether it's through writing, drama or art is so important in giving young people a sense of self-worth.
Michael Morpurgo
#89. Only the best books are special. Why? Because they open our eyes, touch us, excite us, extend us.
Michael Morpurgo
#90. Everyone is interested in war, in that people don't want it to happen. I'm much more interested in peace than in war but it's important to understand why we fight.
Michael Morpurgo
#91. Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a school exercise.
Michael Morpurgo
#92. I think I have always had a strong sense of justice, of fair play, of what is right and what is wrong.
Michael Morpurgo
#93. The crowd were on Fathers side most of them anyways. Everyone loves a loser I thought and there was tears coming in my eyes and I couldn't stop them neither.
Michael Morpurgo
#94. Write because you love it and not because it is something that you think you should do. Always write about something or somebody you know about - something that you feel deeply and passionately about. Never try and force it.
Michael Morpurgo
#95. When children are very young, you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read should reflect that, not gloss over them.
Michael Morpurgo
#96. Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.
Michael Morpurgo
#97. It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn't inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.
Michael Morpurgo
#98. One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.
Michael Morpurgo
#99. Even then, as I stood there, that first morning, filled with apprehension at the terrifying implications of my dreadful situation,
Michael Morpurgo
#100. If there's one thing I can't abide it's fanatics of any kind, and religious ones are the worst of all.
Michael Morpurgo
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