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