Quotes by P. L. Travers

About P. L. Travers:

Pamela Lyndon Travers is known best for the Mary Poppins series of children's books featuring the magical English nanny Mary Poppins.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.

P. L. Travers

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

P. L. Travers

For me, there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.

P. L. Travers

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for - if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.

P. L. Travers

I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.

P. L. Travers

'Friend Monkey' is really my favorite of all my books because the Hindu myth on which it is based is my favorite - the myth of the Monkey Lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went.

P. L. Travers

I never wrote my books especially for children.

P. L. Travers

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.

P. L. Travers

I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.

P. L. Travers

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

P. L. Travers

I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.

P. L. Travers

My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.

P. L. Travers

My father died when I was 7. I was his favorite child, and he was my beloved father. I brought him along with me all through my life. Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me.

P. L. Travers

I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.

P. L. Travers

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my ...

P. L. Travers

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

P. L. Travers

Author Bio

  • NameP. L. Travers
  • DescriptionAustralian-British novelist, actress and journalist
  • AliasesPamela Lyndon Travers; Helen Lyndon Goff
  • BornAugust 9, 1899
  • DiedApril 23, 1996
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; Australia
  • ProfessionPoet; Writer; Novelist; Children's Writer
  • WorksMary Poppins
  • AwardsOfficer Of The Order Of The British Empire