Top 30 Mal Peet Quotes

In my seaside town, there is a plethora of benches, each one bearing a little brass plate commemorating a deceased occupant. You sit with ghosts.

If I were to try to describe the way in which I write, the only word I would use without qualification is ‘slowly.’

‘Keeper’ is about fathers, ultimately. and also conservation, commitment and ambition.

What I value in books is lucidity. I want the language to be rich; I love lexical fireworks on the page, but I have to know what it means. I want to be surprised and delighted, not merely baffled.

Bootworks’ Black Box Theatre has a maximum seating capacity of two – as long as one of you is happy to sit on the other’s lap.

I usually have about four books on the go – a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.

I’m not a great reader of historical fiction; it’s not my favourite genre.

When I’m working, I always read stuff that’s as far away from what I’m working on as possible, so I’ll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.

I never knew that Americans would take up soccer, and it’s a gender-free sport in high school there.

I want to drink champagne from ladies’ shoes.

I’m going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It’s like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he’s stuck – in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.

I didn’t consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn’t think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.

I used to play all the time. I would play football when it was light and read when it was dark.

I have kind of a personality defect in that I find the word ‘no’ hard to articulate.

Everyone who sits on a sofa watching ‘Match of the Day’ is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, ‘That’d never happen’ you’re going to freeze up. You’re writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.

It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.

It’s extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you’re trying to write fiction, not a match report.

It’s a nonsense because, as we all know, there are brilliant 15-year-old readers and hopeless 50-year-old readers. All that categorisation is a matter of bookshop shelves rather than literary categories, I think.

Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.

Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple – sensitively – with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer.

I find myself, by happy accident, writing ‘Young Adult’ fiction. However, I dislike such categories.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to – and to learn from – history.

I try to write stories that will attract younger readers and make them feel part of a wider readership. I do not feel able to write books that are about, or even for, teenagers; and I am inclined to be suspicious of books which ‘target’ them.

After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for ‘Keeper,’ and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.

Exposure is about, among other things, the ferocity of the press and the way – in an echo of some of Shakespeare’s plays – the modern media creates heroes to destroy them.

It was weird – writing is a stupid thing to do. I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I’m a black South American football superstar; then I have to imagine I’m a female pop celebrity who’s pregnant. It’s a completely mad way to spend your time.

I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that’s £25,000 for six years.

‘Smart’, in American usage, is slicker and sharper than ‘intelligent’; faster off the mark and quicker on its feet than deep thought.

Writing is a form of licensed madness.

A sentence that clots in your mouth is unlikely to flow in your mind.