Top 17 Geraldine McCaughrean Quotes

I started writing because I found I could spend more time in my own imagination by doing that than I could by reading.

You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he’s smelling, hear what he’s hearing.

Never apologise for not being someone else. You’re bound to find something you’re good at, even if it’s only writing stories.

I had a very happy childhood, but I still used my imagination as a leisure resort.

I still keep thinking someone will penetrate my guilty secret – that I have been masquerading as a writer all these years while all I was really doing was enjoying myself, pursuing my passion.

I wept my way through teaching practice.

I read hugely as a child, but I slowed up when the print got smaller. I am a very slow reader. I don’t know why. Maybe it is like some people chewing their food for ages and some wolfing it down.

When people write fan-fic sequels to one of your books, it gives you a very strange feeling. It is very flattering but strange, as if the characters have come to life again without you knowing.

‘Would I mind if someone wrote a sequel to one of my books?’ I asked myself, and I decided that I wouldn’t, providing that the writer was respectful, had read my book first, and wasn’t drunk when doing it.

My mum used to tell me to never boil my cabbages twice, and I think it’s artistically valid. While I do find myself on similar themes in my books, I try not to repeat myself, and that’s something which is all too easy to do in series books.

You sort of suspect if a book’s fun to write, it will be fun to read.

The one thing that makes writing a better pastime than reading is that you can make things turn out the way you want in the end!

Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn’t know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.

I always thought writer’s block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

I’m not one of those people who had a burning passion for ‘Peter Pan’ all my life. Although I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the story, I didn’t carry around with me an ambition to one day write the sequel.

Most of my central characters lack confidence but overcome their timidity or low self-esteem to win through in the end, so I suppose there is a kind of wish-fulfillment at work.

I never dreamt I could be an author when I grew up. It just didn’t occur to me, because I thought you had to be a) academic, so go to university, things like that, and I didn’t think I was clever, or b) dead because I just assumed all the authors in the library were dead.