Top 100 Peet Quotes
#1. I think you have to be in an insane stratosphere in terms of fame in order to get offered really well-written scripts. Amanda Peet is definitely not in that group.
Amanda Peet
#2. I knew David Benioff a bit socially. I knew his wife, Amanda Peet. He's a smart guy, so I always sought him out at dinner parties.
Peter Dinklage
#3. 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
#4. I would do a musical, but I can't sing.
Amanda Peet
#5. I don't read reviews, as a rule. I can't, because I can't control myself. But I've heard that [the Duplasses] were happy, so that's good.
Amanda Peet
#6. instead of being in history he was in love
Mal Peet
#7. 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
#8. I think when you're a bigger star you get many good scripts sent to you, and you have to choose which one you're going to gravitate toward, but I just try to gravitate toward the best-written one that's been thrown my way after a lot of girls have passed on it.
Amanda Peet
#9. I never knew that Americans would take up soccer, and it's a gender-free sport in high school there.
Mal Peet
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I love getting dressed up and having someone do my make-up and feeling pretty.
Amanda Peet
#13. There's a very small group of elite actresses who are my age, who people want to work with. It's not easy to get a good job with good actors.
Amanda Peet
#14. When you're an actor, you can be hindered by your own narcissism.
Amanda Peet
#15. 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
#16. The three things that kept me sane as a child were bikes, books, and soccer
Mal Peet
#17. Weak banks endangered sovereigns that were called upon to save them, and weak sovereigns endangered banks holding bonds at risk of default. Recession worsened the debt ratio, but austerity to reduce borrowing suppressed growth, or caused even worse recession.
John Peet
#18. 'Smart', in American usage, is slicker and sharper than 'intelligent'; faster off the mark and quicker on its feet than deep thought.
Mal Peet
#19. I'm a big fan of gallows humor. When my aunt passed away, she was in a coma for a day before my cousins pulled the plug. And the amount of joking and base humor that went on that day around her bed was so insane. It's crazy how people talk when something horrible is happening.
Amanda Peet
#20. 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
#21. As an actor, my main focus is finding good writing and attacking a good role.
Amanda Peet
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. If I had to give up cheese or chocolate, I'd give up chocolate in a heartbeat.
Amanda Peet
#28. I'd love to work with Joan Cusack again - I'm obsessed with Joan Cusack.
Amanda Peet
#29. So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?
Mal Peet
#30. Yes, I still think of him as that, call him that. It's as real as any of his other names.
Mal Peet
#31. I don't really see any barrier between teenage fiction and adult literature.
Mal Peet
#32. Being an actor is really, really hard, no matter how you slice it.
Amanda Peet
#33. I'd like to be someone on 'Games of Thrones.'
Amanda Peet
#34. I have kind of a personality defect in that I find the word 'no' hard to articulate.
Mal Peet
#35. I do recall how I got the ideas for some of my books. Many of them are a result of doodling.
Bill Peet
#36. Nancy has her vision and she's a formidable force to be reckoned with, and that's similar to most of the male directors I've worked with. The only difference is probably inbetween scenes, gossiping with Diane Keaton, Frances McDormand and Nancy Meyers about who's had Botox and who hasn't.
Amanda Peet
#37. I think network television is really hard because it has to sail right away. HBO's so much more nurturing, patient. They think it takes a while for a show to kind of congeal and figure out what its strong spots are.
Amanda Peet
#38. 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
#39. I tend to boycott all teenage reading while I'm trying to write my own stuff.
Mal Peet
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I do know that I think children should be vaccinated because that affects the health of all the other children.
Amanda Peet
#44. Animal personalities have always intrigued me, the desire to find out more about them made a reader out of me.
Bill Peet
#45. 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
#46. I'm interested in people who are very close to the people who commit crimes.
Amanda Peet
#47. 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
#48. If there were some recipe that would make all of our children really sane and civic-minded and hugely intelligent, I think we'd probably all do it. But I don't know that there is a recipe for creating that.
Amanda Peet
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. When I read "The Whole Nine Yards" I was like, 'Okay, this is a G-spot role'.
Amanda Peet
#52. 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
#53. I wrote a play before that and it never saw the light of day. And then I started working on this play and it came out really quickly. Eventually I got it, and I wrote a letter to Sarah Jessica Parker and she wanted to do it. So that's how it happened.
Amanda Peet
#54. I have to make little movies. I have to sit and film.
Mal Peet
#55. They [Mark and Jay Duplass] both have young kids and talk about parenting all the time. So they get it. So they knew that it was a very delicate time and they knew that it was a lot. All it did was make me want to protect them from - and protect production from - any kind of burden.
Amanda Peet
#56. 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
#57. I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff.
Amanda Peet
#58. Although arguably, it's my job to dig deep whether I'm improvising or not. It's just their style. That's the way they feel like they get what they want. I mean, they're really good storytellers, so I love being in their hands.
Amanda Peet
#59. 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
#60. If you think about it, there aren't that many women who are in their 40s, who are Jewish and funny and stage-worthy.
Amanda Peet
#61. As much use as tits on a fish.
Mal Peet
#62. I certainly don't believe in love at first sight. I definitely believe in a lot of chemistry and lust at first sight. I think that love is something that takes work.
Amanda Peet
#63. Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.
Mal Peet
#64. 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
#65. I want to entertain, but I also want to push the barriers beyond what kids are conditioned into accepting.
Mal Peet
#66. 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
#67. Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians!
Mal Peet
#68. A sentence that clots in your mouth is unlikely to flow in your mind.
Mal Peet
#69. If you take 'Cheers' and 'Seinfeld' and watch the early shows, they're kind of awkward. It took a while for the writers and everything to gel.
Amanda Peet
#70. 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
#71. I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.
Amanda Peet
#72. 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
#73. I don't clean, I don't make the bed. I spend my salary. I worry a lot. I just don't worry about socks on the floor.
Amanda Peet
#74. Writing is a form of licensed madness.
Mal Peet
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Someone with a figure like Jennifer Aniston has a trainer, a cook spinning out some version of the latest diet, and probably a stop at the tanning salon.
Amanda Peet
#78. I'm technologically an imbecile. But I do use the camera phone!
Amanda Peet
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Since I got a really bad review when I was, like, 28 in 'The New York Times,' I don't read reviews anymore.
Amanda Peet
#83. I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other.
Amanda Peet
#84. 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
#85. He can't even be at a casual read and not be creating the whole thing in his mind. I remember feeling very awed about how much he still seems to be so in love with it, and so dedicated to making everything really real and really spontaneous.
Amanda Peet
#86. 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
#87. I used to play all the time. I would play football when it was light and read when it was dark.
Mal Peet
#88. Rigid geometry forced in varied curves is "mother," / is "nature," is systematic violation." Muy Bueno. / This device is for you, the mutilated of no art.
Christian Peet
#89. I have a feeling there is no ideal situation, unless she could go back in time and be 22 again. I think some of it is just kind of the shock of realizing that you're approaching middle age, or that you are middle-aged and kind of coming to terms with that in whatever incremental ways.
Amanda Peet
#90. Whenever I was with Kevin Pollak, I had to leave the room.
Amanda Peet
#91. 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
#92. But I get ahead of myself, which is nearly as bad as getting Above Myself.
Mal Peet
#93. He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.
Mal Peet
#94. 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
#95. I'm not a great reader of historical fiction; it's not my favourite genre.
Mal Peet
#96. In a romantic comedy, it's usually a good idea to have people who can't stand the fact that they are attracted to each other.
Amanda Peet
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. The thing I noticed about Jack was when we did a reading of the script, just to warm up.
Amanda Peet
#100. Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.
Mal Peet
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
