Quotes from Mal Peet

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.

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

I'm going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It's like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he's stuck - in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple - sensitively - with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer.

I want to drink champagne from ladies' shoes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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