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" I want to help children develop strengths that allow them to feel they don't have to push things away mentally... If we 'cotton-ball' kids, it produces adults who are too scared to think for themselves and are easily manipulated. "

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" Most of your life after puberty, you're either seeking to reproduce or living with the consequences of having done so. At 70, you start going back to being 11 again. "

Morris Gleitzman

Life

Consequences

Living

" In all of my books, I'm taking them on an emotionally challenging and sometimes physically dangerous process with a bit of fun and anarchy along the way. With the power comes responsibility. "

" Step-parenting and being a step-sibling presents a lot of exciting opportunities. When families break up and re-form, there may be less order, less certainty, and a bit more trauma involved, but kids can end up having half-a-dozen parent figures. "

" I like to write stories where young people have a strong feeling about something being fair or unfair, right or wrong, cruel or kind, and they act on the basis of that - often in the face of the prevailing limits of behaviour. "

" I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle. "

" Children know when they are being sold a sanitised version of the world, and I think that's a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader. "

" When I did finally live in the Dandenongs, the mountain ash forests became an important part of my life. "

" Kids aren't political, but around 10 years old, they are beginning to develop the moral grounding that might later, in their teens, develop into their first real political perspectives. "

" The type of stories I write are about young people grappling with the biggest problems in their lives, often problems that are bigger than they're actually capable of solving. "

" Kid's culture is often dismissed as superficial, like high fibre McDonald's, but it's so much more important than that. "

" It's our potential for good stuff I'm most interested in exploring, but that has most meaning when juxtaposed with things that can go wrong. "

Morris Gleitzman

Good

Exploring

" Stories can bring alive the moral universe in a very vivid, useful, engaging way. "

" I think probably you can either write for kids, or you can't. That ability to imaginatively be a child and see the world as a child and feel and think like a child - you either have that ability or you don't. "

" I used to get stuck trying to find the first sentence of a story, then I realised that it was often because I didn't know what problem a character was facing in the story. As soon as I did, I could have the character trying to do something about it or have the problem whack him between the eyes. "

" Because kids are physically smaller, there's an assumption by people who haven't read a kids' book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometimes the opposite is true. "

" Children have limited power to shape their own lives, but when they can experiment with possibilities through books, their optimism can be recharged and kept alive. "

" Kids who are nine, 10 and 11 are pretty sophisticated readers; they know that there isn't always a good outcome every time and that problems don't always have solutions. "

" Melbourne is my type of city, much more so than Sydney. "

Morris Gleitzman

Sydney

City

" I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother. "

" Because of my poor writing posture, I started walking in the forest every day, and I found it a potent place to be creatively. It changed me in that it was a new way of doing my creative process, and I realised how much I liked being among tall trees. "

" If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface. "

" I wrote stories as a kid just for myself. One day, some of the kids in my class found some of my stories in my bag, and I was deeply embarrassed until I realised they enjoyed reading them. "

" I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness. "

" I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film. "

" My capacity for humour may have come largely from my father - he liked to entertain people, make people laugh. "

" I've always been interested in setting my stories against a big event, the importance of which my younger readers are slowly becoming aware of as they move into their teens. "

" I think, to be a successful author, you've got to be part recluse and part show-off. "

" Boys, particularly, like stories where they can have images in their imagination, where they can go to scary places and experiment with what can happen. "

Morris Gleitzman

Imagination

Places

" In 1969, we emigrated to Australia. It was a big change. The heat, the flies, and the completely different tinned meats. The shock was so great, I stopped reading books for nearly a year. "

" Halfway through primary school, I realised that I was not as physically strong or fearless as many kids. So, in situations of conflict, I quickly learned that it worked better for me to get out of situations or maybe kind of, you know, prevail in a conflict situation by using humour than by trying to punch somebody out. "

Morris Gleitzman

Conflict

Fearless