Parenting & Family Quote by Cornelia Funke

There is a sly kind of brag hiding in Funke's casualness: the phrase "I just did" makes the creation of a picture book sound like an afternoon’s work, when in reality it’s a labor of drafting, illustration, pacing, and public expectation. That offhand tone is the point. Funke isn’t selling genius; she’s selling intimacy.

The real heat in the line comes from the pivot to family: "you will find both of my children in there". On the surface, it’s a sweet author-parent flex, the kind that plays well in interviews and school visits. Underneath, it’s a statement about how children’s literature is often a disguised autobiography, smuggled into a format that pretends to be purely for kids. She’s admitting that the "wildest brother" isn’t only a character; he’s a composite of lived domestic energy, filtered through narrative craft. The choice of "find" matters, too. It frames the book as a scavenger hunt for readers, but it also hints at the author’s own act of discovery: parenting as source material you don’t fully understand until you turn it into story.

Contextually, Funke’s career has long balanced epic fantasy with a tactile, homey sense of wonder. Dropping her children into the book is a way of collapsing the distance between the famous author brand and the private household that feeds it. It’s also a quiet claim of authority: she writes about kids not as an observer, but as someone living in their weather.