Mal Peet quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mal Peet

Mal Peet Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mal Peet on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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

We should just bomb them back to the Stone Age.

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

As much use as tits on a fish.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I want to drink champagne from ladies' shoes.

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.

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

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

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

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

instead of being in history he was in love

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.

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.

Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians!

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.

Thank God in an atheist.

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

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

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

Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.

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

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

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.

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

Writing is a form of licensed madness.

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

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

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

Fluke me, Murdstone.

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

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

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.

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