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.

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

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

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.

'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.

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.