None of the seven is really good, for the excellent reason that Australian children never are.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

Generally speaking, all true children's stories make promises to their readers. Here you are, they say, unhandy and short, and there is a big world that one day will be yours. Listen to how it happened for Cinderella once upon a time, and Jack with his beanstalk, and Aladdin with his lamp.

I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.

The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.