Mal Peet Quotes

The very provision of benches by the council or the corporation acknowledges the human need to be private in public, to be conspicuously idle, to have nothing better to do.

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

Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.

Grandad taught me that the alien signs and symbols of algebraic equations were not just marks on paper. They were not flat. They were three-dimensional, and you could approach them from different directions, look at them from different ways, stand them on their heads. You could take them apart and put them back together in a variety of shapes, like Legos. I stopped being scared of them.

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.

As much use as tits on a fish.

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.

Keeper had shifted the limits of my world, or maybe simply rubbed them out. Now, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was preparing to take a free kick at me. It

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.

The view from here was lovely, constant, and never the same. Somehow, it was always sympathetic to his mood.

The three things that kept me sane as a child were bikes, books, and soccer

Boredom had not been among the dangers that the SOE had prepared him for. No pompous little officer had stood in front of his class and said, "Right, chaps, today we're going to learn how to deal with a particularly nasty little situation that secret agents tend to find themselves in: being bored abso-bloody-lutely rigid".

So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?

We should just bomb them back to the Stone Age.

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

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.

Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.

If you weren't here and Oma died, I'd deal with it. Because there'd be nothing more to lose. It'd be just me. But now it's different; it's worse. Because you're yet another person to lose. You do stupid, dangerous things, and every time you go away, I pray in agony that you'll come back. It's unfair. Hope is pulling me to pieces. I can't stand it.

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.

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

If there was ever a species that deserved purging from the surface of the planet, it is humanity. We are, or should be, a temporary infestation or infection, a smart virus awaiting its divine antidote.

Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to.

Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children's writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull.

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

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.

The screen filled with a pure and simple blue in which a few black pixels floated.

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.

He loved her. It was dead simple, the way he loved her. Seamless. His love was like a wall that he'd built around her, and there wasn't a chink or flaw in it. Or so he thought. But then she started to float out of the real world, his world, and he was like a little boy trying to dam a stream with stones and mud, knowing that the water would always break through at a place he wasn't looking at. There was nothing desperate about the way he did it, though. He was always calm, it seemed. Expecting the worst and determined not to crack. She started to get up in the night and turn on all the taps, and he would get up too and stand quietly beside her watching the endless flow of water as if he found it as fascinating as she did. Then he'd guide her back to bed before turning the taps off. One night I heard something and went into the living room and saw the two of them standing out on the balcony. He'd wrapped his dressing gown around her, and I heard him say, "Yes, you are right, Marijke. The traffic is like a river of stars. Would you like to watch is some more, or go back to bed?

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.

Unfortunately, however, weapons of mass destruction tend to attract maniacs: men - it's almost always men - who want to jab the red button and yell "Take that, you heathen infidel bastards!" and sit in their revolving chairs in underground lead-lined bunkers or caves, watching on their monitors World War III or the Final Jihad or whatever.

He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.

It still, after all these years, puts frost into my blood to remember that men like LeMay and Powers had their fingers so close to the button.

Kennedy was not perfectly sure that Khrushchev was an entirely rational being. He was not absolutely certain that the Soviet Union wouldn't be happy to rule a world that was half toxic ash.

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.

But he knew, for example, that the things at the ends of his legs were his feet and that if he chose to waggle them, they would waggle. There they went. He knew that if he wanted to he could go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea and not get lost. So he did.

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.

I want to entertain, but I also want to push the barriers beyond what kids are conditioned into accepting.

I don't really see any barrier between teenage fiction and adult literature.

I can explain to you why algebra is useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.' He moved his fingers gently on my temples. 'It's to keep what is in here healthy. PE for the head. And the great thing is you can do it sitting down.

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'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.

Imagination is highly suspect. Reality is what is beautiful. But we are blind to it because it is familiar.

Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians!

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.

I want to drink champagne from ladies' shoes.

Thank God in an atheist.

Writers no longer work in solitude, crafting meaningful and elegant prose. No. They have to spend most of their time selling themselves on the fucking internet. Blogging and tweeting and updating their bloody Facebook pages and their wretched narcissistic websites.

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

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.

Gone are the days when you simply write a jolly good book and wait for the queues to form. Readers need to be friended, darling. They need to be subscribers. They need to be followers.

Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together.

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters; it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.

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

Remember that a good football novel has to have the same ingredients as any other good novel: drama, convincing and interesting characters, a strong story-line, and some kind of magic in the writing.

The US military and the CIA got busy working on plans for the conquest of Cuba. And it would be no Mickey Mouse boat operation this time. This time, Fidel Castro and his hairy henchmen would find out what it felt like to have American fighter-bombers drop the fires of hell on their heads three hundred times a day.

Writing is a form of licensed madness.

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.

What I'm trying to explain to my sulky little cousin is that we are doing things backwards. We are going from the end of the river to the start of the river. And endings are always sad. We are doing the sad bit first, which is wrong. Strange.

I have to make little movies. I have to sit and film.

I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it.

I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.

Yes, I still think of him as that, call him that. It's as real as any of his other names.