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 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.
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.
I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.
I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.
