Meg Rosoff Quotes
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I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.
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There's an overwhelming sense of paranoia in the suburbs. People there seem so much more paranoid to me than people in the city about their kids being kidnapped or their parties being raided or their drinks being spiked. There's a kind of hysteria about that.
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The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you're trying to tell them.
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I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.
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My husband is my most valuable resource.
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I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.
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People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry.
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Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.
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As a person with the retentive mental capacity of a goldfish and a dislike of repetition, I frequently make use of the thesaurus built into my Microsoft Word U.K. Software.
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It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading.
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Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.
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I'd like to think life has improved since 1850, despite the long hours we all seem to spend slaving over hot computers, but the psychological journeys remain the same - the search for love, identity, a meaningful place in the world.
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Teenagers are very dark, I think. That's all the goth and emo stuff. They're experiencing a lot of stuff that adults experience, but in a much more raw way. It's that extremity that I'm interested in, to be able to go down so far and come up so quickly.
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I think most people struggle over a matter of years to find a satisfying way to live.
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Nowadays, I only review books I really like. It's cowardly, I know, but I figure it's not my job to make people unhappy. I'll leave that to the professionals.
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I know from experience that careers do not always arise from a deep sense of destiny.
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In the odd moment when I am not thinking about horses, I write books.
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Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.
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The truth about love is that you don't always fall in love with whom you are supposed to fall in love with. Love just hits you. It is a transcendent thing. Sometimes it is your best friend's husband and sometimes it's your father. It's weird. But that's a fact of life.
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Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.
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I loved horses and horse books as a child.
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I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn't be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them - but there's no way I was touching those bugs.
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I'm not sure I can write about America for the same reason I'm not sure I can write about adults - I have no critical distance on either place.
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I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.