Quotes from Mal Peet

Writing is a form of licensed madness.

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.

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

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

instead of being in history he was in love

What I'm trying to explain to my sulky little cousin is that we are doing things backwards. We are going from the end of the river to the start of the river. And endings are always sad. We are doing the sad bit first, which is wrong. Strange.

History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. 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.

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

Unfortunately, however, weapons of mass destruction tend to attract maniacs: men - it's almost always men - who want to jab the red button and yell "Take that, you heathen infidel bastards!" and sit in their revolving chairs in underground lead-lined bunkers or caves, watching on their monitors World War III or the Final Jihad or whatever.

I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world's. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. 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

The past is a dark house, and we have only torches with dying batteries. It's probably best not to spend too much time in there in case the rotten floor gives way beneath our feet.

He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.

Boredom had not been among the dangers that the SOE had prepared him for. No pompous little officer had stood in front of his class and said, "Right, chaps, today we're going to learn how to deal with a particularly nasty little situation that secret agents tend to find themselves in: being bored abso-bloody-lutely rigid".

This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved. At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.

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

Thank God in an atheist.

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.

Yoyo said to me recently, 'Love and pain, that's what families are, and they fit together like this'--he slotted the tips of our fingers together--'like cogs.' Then he smiled and put a hand on my swollen belly. 'And what makes these cogs turn is hope, of course.

Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year.

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

Fast unmittelbar darauf sandte der Dschungel seine schlanken grünen Finger auf die Fläche die Gato velassen hatte, und tastete nach neuen Stellen, wo er wachsen konnte.

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

If there was ever a species that deserved purging from the surface of the planet, it is humanity. We are, or should be, a temporary infestation or infection, a smart virus awaiting its divine antidote.

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