48 Quotes by P. L. Travers

"Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written."

"I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I never wrote my books especially for children."

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

"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 writing life."

"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."

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