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

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

History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. 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

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

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

Writing is a form of licensed madness.

Mal Peet

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

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

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

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

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

Mal Peet

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

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

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

Mal Peet

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mal Peet

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