John Boyne Quotes

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.

I like 'fresh fruit flan'," said the donkey. "Three excellent words."
"I don't have one," said Noah immediately before the question could even be asked, and the donkey opened his eyes wide in suprise, and for a moment Noah wondered whether he might even consider eating him.

Does it ever get easier?" she asked.
I nodded. "It does," I said. You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who's gone terribly and then it's not grief at all, it's more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you. I think of Bastiaan every day, of course. But I've grown accustomed to his absence.

Irritated by the fact that the rules that always applied to children never seemed to apply to grown-ups at all (despite the fact that they were the ones who enforced them).

And shortly after that the blob became a figure. And then, as Bruno got even closer, he saw that the thing was neither a dot nor a speck nor a blob nor a figure, but a person.

It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.

We even shared a young man from time to time. Oh don't look so shocked, Cyril. It was the 1930s, people were a lot more evolved then than they are today.

I married up several times. And then across once or twice. And then beneath me. I never quite found the right level somehow. Perhaps I should have married diagonally or in a slightly curved direction.

However, as the consequences of Black Thursday began to settle in investors' minds, most people attempted to recover their losses and the dramatic selling began again. On Tuesday 29 October, the day of the Wall Street Crash, more than 16 million shares were dumped in an afternoon of trading. On that one single day, as much money was lost on the New York stock exchange as had been spent in its entirety by the US government on fighting the First World War. It was a disaster. Annette

Would there be no end to publishing, he wondered? Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years, and allowed readers to catch up.

He decided to talk to the Hopeless Case

The dot that became a speck that became a blob that became a figure that became a boy

I think perhaps the adults we become are formed in childhood and there's no way around it.

When you sit down with a book, you are separating yourself out of your world for a few hours and getting lost in the story.

No woman will ever take care of my children but me, she said. I will not allow it, do you understand?
And after I am gone Madge Toxley, if you try to make them yours, then you will live to regret it.

But once, in his anger, Aidan had asked me whether I thought I had wasted my life, and I had told him no. No, I had not. But I had been wrong. And Tom Cardle has been right. For I had known everything, right from the start, and never acted on any of it. I had blocked it from my mind time and again, refused to recognize what was staring me in the face. I had said nothing when I should have spoken out, convincing myself that I was a man of higher character. I had been complicit in all their crimes, and people had suffered because of me. I had wasted my life. I had wasted every moment of my life. And the final irony was that it had taken a convicted pedophile to show me that in my silence, I was just as guilty as the rest of them.

I think Maurice is whatever he needs to be, whenever he needs to be it. He's an operator, that's for sure.

Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.

But here's what you have to remember: There are no homosexuals in Ireland. You might have got it into your head that you are one but you're just wrong, it's as simple as that. You're wrong.

Let's not play games, Mr. Cratchett," I replied. "I wanted to let you know that I'll be coming in for an appointment with Mr. Raisin on Tuesday morning at eleven o'clock. I shall need about an hour and would prefer it if we were not disturbed during that time. I hope that he will be free at that hour but just so you both know, if he is not, then I am perfectly willing to sit in your office until he is free. I shall bring a book with me to pass the time. I shall bring two, if need be. I shall bring the complete works of Shakespeare if he insists on keeping me waiting interminably and those plays will get me through the long hours. But I will not leave until I have seen him, are we quite clear on that? Now, I wish you a very pleasant Sunday, Mr. Cratchett. Enjoy your lunch, won't you? Your breath smells of whisky.

It's as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us.

the ground for I know not how long. Of course

It occurs to me that even though Zoya and I are both still alive, my life is already over. She will be taken from me soon and there will be no reason for me to continue without her. We are one person, you see. We are GeorgyandZoya.

Just don't ever tell yourself that you didn't know ... That would be the worst crime of all.

My six uncles, their dark hair glistening with rose-scented lacquer, sat next to her in ascending order of age and stupidity. >>
In her absence they would say that she had always been a floozy and this mattered a great deal to my mother, for she and the person they would fashion from their sordid imaginations would have little in common except for a name.

But there was something about the new house that made Bruno think that no one ever laughed there; that there was nothing to laugh at and nothing to be happy about.

Please don't let Julian die, I asked God. And please stop me from being a homosexual. Only when I stood up and walked away did I realize that that had been two prayers, so I went back and lit a second candle, which cost me another penny.

Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see.

I was dropped by my publisher after my first two books. But I always believed in myself.

What do dreams mean anyway? They're just a lot of silly nonsense.'
'Or wish fulfilment. The subconscious representation of our true desires.

I don't understand why we're not allowed on the oder side of the fence. What's so wrong with us that we can't go there and play?

I never really noticed it any more, in the way that one often ignores familiar things, like seat cushions or loved ones.

Occasionally, Charles and Maude would host a dinner party where they would come together as Husband and Wife, and on such occasions I would be brought down and passed around from couple to couple like a Fabergé egg they'd purchased from a descendant of the last Russian Tsar.

Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.

How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years, I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth?

A man was standing at the end of the hallway, just outside an open door, from where a great light shone, illuminating him almost as a god.

What's wrong with you people?" he asked, looking at me as if I was clinically insane. "What's wrong with Ireland? Are you all just fucking nuts over there, is that it? Don't you want each other to be happy?"
"No," I said, finding my country a difficult one to explain. "No, I don't think we do.

Retractable roof, a pair of black, white and red

I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.

I suppose books are my real passion in life.

And I am not one of these long-living fictional characters who prays for death as a release from the captivity of eternal life; not for me the endless whining and wailing of the undead.

I've spent so much time pushing the boat out that I forgot to jump on and now it's out beyond the harbour on the high seas, but it's very nice to look at.

He tells a story, and that's what I like. Does this fella tell a story? He doesn't spend twenty pages describing the colour of the sky?'
'He hasn't so far.'
'Good. Jeffrey Archer never talks about the colour of the sky and I like that in a writer. I'd say Jeffrey Archer has never even looked up at the sky his entire life.'
'Especially now that he's in prison,' I suggested.

You're a bit of an oddball, Jonathan,' I said. 'Has anyone ever told you that?'
'Nineteen people this year alone,' he said. 'And it's only May.

Other things are probably better off left alone. Like a dead mouse at the back of a cupboard.

I think this was a bad idea,' he repeated. 'I think the best thing to do would be to forget all about this and just go back home. We can chalk it up to experience,

You look like a Greek God sent down by the immortal Zeus from Mount Olympus to taunt the rest of us inferior beings with your astonishing beauty, I said, which somehow in translation came out as "you look fine, why?

Leaving me an orphan like those characters I had spoken of the night before, if one can truly be called an orphan at twenty-one years of age.

I turned to leave and was exiting the gates when I heard the sound of feet running quickly along the gravel behind me. I turned and saw Alexei, who showed no sign of slowing down, so I opened my arms and he ran into them, embracing me tightly, his arms wrapped around my neck as I lifted him off the ground.
"I wanted you to know," he said, his voice choked up as if he was trying to stop himself from crying, "I wanted you to know that you can be my brother if you like. As long as you let me be yours.

Sitting around miserable all day won't make you any happier.

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.

It has always astonished me, Georgy Daniilovich, that those who are most repulsed by autocratic or dictatorial rule are among the first to eliminate their enemies once they take on the mantle of power themselves.

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Both boys stayed very quiet for a few minutes, neither one wanting to say anything he might regret.

Do you think ... ?
'I do sometimes, my boy,'admitted the old man. 'When I can't avoid it.

It's enough to make me laugh. I close the door behind me and sit down again, considering this, and truly, I find it so funny that I laugh until I cry.
And when the tears come I think aah ...
So this is what it means to be alone.

The history that one can create with a friend, a lifetime of history and shared experience, is a wonderful thing and shabbily sacrificed. And yet a true friend is a rare thing; sometimes those whom we perceive as friends are simply people with whom we spend a lot of time.

The notion that he had a life outside our life, outside our friendship, was deeply hurtful to me.

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder.

And been committed to a home for the bewildered

And what did I do, only slip my hand inside his own and say that maybe he should hold my hand instead for a while, and I can see the look on his face even to this day. The shock and the desire. Oh, I loved the power I had over him! The power I could sense in myself! You won't understand this but it's something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she's around fiteen or sixteen. Maybe it's even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I've always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they'd rule the world. But they don't. I don't know why. And for all their weakness and stupidity, men are smart enough to know that being in charge counts for a lot. They have that over us at least.' (p. 561-562)

Well you've been brought here against your will, just like I have. If you ask me, we're all in the same boat. And it's leaking.

We don't have the luxury of thinking ... Some people make all the decisions for us

Bruno was jealous, he had to wear stupid pants en shoes while the boys at the other side of the fence were wearing nice pyjamas al day long

I move between the two: I write an adult novel, and then I write a children's book. I quite enjoy that. It's a nice change of pace each time.

He suddenly became convinced that if he didn't do something sensible, something to put his mind to some use, then before he knew it he would be wondering round the streets having fights with himself and inviting domestic animals to social occasions too.

The problem with today's young people', I said, 'isn't that they do things which are bad for them, as so much of the media likes to think. It's that they don't do these things right. You're all so intent on getting off your heads on drugs that you don't think about the fact that you could overdose and, to put it plainly, die. You drink until your liver explodes. You smoke until your lungs collapse beneath the rot. You create diseases which threaten to wipe you out. Have fun, by all means. Be debauched, it's your duty. But be wise about it. All things in excess, but just know how to cope with them, that's all I ask.

Where do [writers] get [their] ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where the come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven, and we reach and grab one, to grasp in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a cafe and a whole novel will be built from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend in a supermarket . . . .

The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.

I like the idea of standalone novels. I always found with series of books, it's something that publishers love obviously because they can make a lot of money and they build an audience from book to book, but I don't like that as a writer. I prefer the idea of just telling a story, completing it within your book, and moving on and not forcing a child to read eight of them.

Pavel is not a doctor any more, Bruno' said Maria quietly. 'But he was. In another life. Before he came here

Bruno. 'In Berlin we had a big house with five floors if you counted the

I said my goodbyes to Madge at the front door and watched her for a few moments as she made her way down the driveway before closing it again. At first I rested my forehead against the woodwork, wondering what I might do next, but as I turned, a hand grabbed me by the neck and threw me across the floor. I hit the wall of the hallway with a scream and felt a body, invisible, rushing towards me. Before it could reach me, however, another presence swept in from my left side and there was a sound like thunder as they collided, one roaring at the other, before both presences disappeared entirely, leaving only one thing, one familiar thing, in their wake. The scent of cinnamon.

Please don't embarrass yourself by offering an opinion.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

For the first time in my life, I started to think about my own mortality. Should I fall or have a heart attack, I could lie on the kitchen floor decomposing for weeks before anyone thought to come looking for me. I didn't even have a cat to eat me.

Actually, they were very strange parents,' I told her. 'Neither of them were what you might call conventional people. And they had an extremely peculiar approach to parenting. Sometimes I felt as if I were little more than a tenant in their house, as if they weren't entirely sure what I was doing there. But they never mistreated me, nor did they ever do anything to hurt me. And perhaps they loved me in their own way. The concept itself might have been slightly alien to them.'
'And did you love them?'
'Yes, I did,' I said without hesitation. 'I loved them both very much. Despite everything. But then children usually do. They look for safety and security, and one way or another Charles and Maude provided that.' (p. 556)

You were never a real Avery," he hissed. "You know that, don't you?"
"I do," I said.
"But Christ on a bike, you came close. You came damned close.

Don't you ever think,' he asked cautiously, 'that it would be better to be a bully than to be bullied? At least that way no one could ever hurt you.'

Katarina turned to him in amazement. 'No,' she said definitively, shaking her head. 'No Pieter, I never think that, not for a moment.

Oh, I hate him,' she said, and I noticed a flush of colour come into her cheeks and the manner in which the fingers of her left hand dug into her palm, as if she wanted something to take away the pain. 'I absolutely detest him. Afterwards, I didn't feel very much at all for a week or two. I suppose I was in shock. But then the fury rose and it hasn't subsided since. Sometimes I find it difficult to control. I think it was around the time that everyone stopped asking me whether I was all right, when lives went back to how they had been before. Had he been in Dublin I might well have gone over there, broken down his door and stabbed him as he slept. Fortunately for him, he was in Madagascar with his lepers.' (p. 268)

And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let it go.

I've always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they'd rule the world.

[...] Wasn't it lonely? Your life, I mean."
"Yes."
"You're alone?"
"Yes."
"You live alone?"
"I am entirely alone, Marian," I repeated quietly.

This deficiency would be scorched into our future like an ill-considered tattoo.

His position, like so many of his ilk, was one of uncontested and unearned respect.

Only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.

It's so unfair, I don't see whij I have to be stuck over here on this side of the fence where there's no one to talk to and no one to play with and you get to have dozens of friends are probably playing for hours every day, I'll have to speak to Father about it.

It's a wonderful thing to write for children.

In his heart, he knew that there was no reason to be impolite to someone, even if they did work for you. There was such a thing as manners after all.

But they'd never once invited any of the striped pyjama people to dinner.

And soon afterwards this manuscript will appear, my final book ... There will be outrage and disgust and people will turn on me at the last, they will hate me, my reputation will for ever be destroyed, my punishment earned, self-inflicted like this gunshot wound, and the world will finally know that I was the greatest feather man of them all.

Bruno: Why do you wear pajamas all day?
Shmuel: The soldiers. They took all our clothes away.
Bruno: My dad's a soldier, but not the sort that takes people's clothes away.

A marriage should be about friendship and companionship, not about sex.

He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.

What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?

Here's a tip though', he told me, leaning over and pressing a hand into my shoulder. 'If you want to improve your time, run faster.

He knew that sometimes people who were sad didn't want to be asked about it; sometimes they'd offer the information themselves and sometimes they wouldn't stop talking about it for months on end, but on this occasion Bruno thought that he should wait before saying anything.

People try to glorify war, particularly those who aren't actually fighting in them. People tend to make heroes of those who are fighting in them.

They sat there in ascending order of age and stupidity.