Mal Peet Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I want to entertain, but I also want to push the barriers beyond what kids are conditioned into accepting.
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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.
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If I were to try to describe the way in which I write, the only word I would use without qualification is 'slowly.'
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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.
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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.
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I never knew that Americans would take up soccer, and it's a gender-free sport in high school there.
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I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.
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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.
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Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to.
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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.
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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.
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'Keeper' is about fathers, ultimately. and also conservation, commitment and ambition.
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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.
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I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.
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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.
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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.
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I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.
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Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.
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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.
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I tend to boycott all teenage reading while I'm trying to write my own stuff.
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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.