Mal Peet Quotes

#1. Mal Peet: "In terms of sustaining a literate and literary culture, the books we put into our children's hands are immeasurably more important than the latest works of high-profile novelists.

M.G. Harris

#2. Yoyo said to me recently, 'Love and pain, that's what families are, and they fit together like this'--he slotted the tips of our fingers together--'like cogs.' Then he smiled and put a hand on my swollen belly. 'And what makes these cogs turn is hope, of course.

Mal Peet

#3. 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.

Mal Peet

#4. I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.

Mal Peet

#5. 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.

Mal Peet

#6. I was a bit odd. I read books and wanted to draw and go to art school.

Mal Peet

#7. 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.

Mal Peet

#8. Fluke me, Murdstone.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#13. 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.

Mal Peet

#14. I tend to boycott all teenage reading while I'm trying to write my own stuff.

Mal Peet

#15. Philip Murdstone sat considering the phrase 'depths of despair'. Its plural implied that there were, even now, levels of it he had yet to experience.

Mal Peet

#16. 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.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#18. 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

Mal Peet

#19. 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.

Mal Peet

#20. Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year.

Mal Peet

#21. I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.

Mal Peet

#22. instead of being in history he was in love

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#24. 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.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#26. 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.

Mal Peet

#27. 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.

Mal Peet

#28. 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.

Mal Peet

#29. 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.

Mal Peet

#30. Thank God in an atheist.

Mal Peet

#31. We should just bomb them back to the Stone Age.

Mal Peet

#32. 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.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#34. 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.

Mal Peet

#35. 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.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#37. 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.

Mal Peet

#38. 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.

Mal Peet

#39. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.

Mal Peet

#40. I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#42. 'Keeper' is about fathers, ultimately. and also conservation, commitment and ambition.

Mal Peet

#43. I want to drink champagne from ladies' shoes.

Mal Peet

#44. The USA and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore- in theory at least-neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#46. 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.

Mal Peet

#47. 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.

Mal Peet

#48. Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#51. 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.

Mal Peet

#52. I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.

Mal Peet

#53. As much use as tits on a fish.

Mal Peet

#54. Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.

Mal Peet

#55. 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.

Mal Peet

#56. You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.

Mal Peet

#57. The past is a dark house, and we have only torches with dying batteries. It's probably best not to spend too much time in there in case the rotten floor gives way beneath our feet.

Mal Peet

#58. Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians!

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#60. 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.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#62. Writing is a form of licensed madness.

Mal Peet

#63. 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.

Mal Peet

#64. 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.

Mal Peet

#65. 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.

Mal Peet

#66. The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.

Mal Peet

#67. 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.

Mal Peet

#68. This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved.
At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#71. 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.

Mal Peet

#72. 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.

Mal Peet

#73. 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.

Mal Peet

#74. 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.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#76. 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.

Mal Peet

#77. 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.

Mal Peet

#78. Normally, I'm a grumpy old man - whenever I read about celebrity, I start to grind my teeth and pull my hair; it seems synonymous with idiocy.

Mal Peet

#79. 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.

Mal Peet

#80. Benches and books have things in common beyond the fact that they're generally to do with sitting. Both are forms of public privacy, intimate spaces widely shared.

Mal Peet

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

Mal Peet

#82. 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.

Mal Peet

#83. But I get ahead of myself, which is nearly as bad as getting Above Myself.

Mal Peet

#84. He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.

Mal Peet