I have a great ability to improvise verbally, and I am very funny on a dime.
No one is perfect. Your ERA is not zero. You're not going to have 30 wins. And your batting average isn't going to be 1.000. So you don't have the right to verbally talk out about somebody. Look at yourself. Did you do everything you could do? Did you start your day off right? Are you perfect?
It's a feeling without a lid, of what you would do, physically, verbally, to protect the one thing that is your greatest love.
One of the primary motivations for the series is that I never really felt that I was a person who could explain verbally what I thought all that well.
We're still expected to color within the lines of accepted femininity, and women who step out of those lines are usually attacked, whether verbally or physically.
You can't steal every scene. There are scenes in which you need to sit back and do a lot less, verbally, physically.
The worst thing about being the laureate has been the attitude of a tiny minority of adults who haven't liked some of the things I'm supposed to have said and who have used it as an opportunity to be verbally abusive and nasty, but I haven't let it rule my world!
More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.
When I go and speak now at all sorts of conferences, later in the night there's always a better Maxie Walker than me. Billy Birmingham's legendary for basically being able to verbally kneecap any of a number of Australia's characters, particularly in the commentary box.
She didn't leave any written instructions. She has verbally expressed her wishes to me and other people.
