Quotes from Meg Rosoff

I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.

I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.

Every day a piano doesn't fall on my head is good luck.

I know from experience that careers do not always arise from a deep sense of destiny.

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

My daughter is a fantastic travelling companion - she's totally organised, whereas I'm hopeless.

While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.

This was what happiness felt like - this wondrous, miraculous alternative to dread.

The imagination can be dangerous. It can change the world. And that is why we write.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.

I have never written out of a desire to be controversial.

Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.

I'm not sure I can write about America for the same reason I'm not sure I can write about adults - I have no critical distance on either place.

Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.

Teenagers are very dark, I think. That's all the goth and emo stuff. They're experiencing a lot of stuff that adults experience, but in a much more raw way. It's that extremity that I'm interested in, to be able to go down so far and come up so quickly.

People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry.

I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.

The truth about love is that you don't always fall in love with whom you are supposed to fall in love with. Love just hits you. It is a transcendent thing. Sometimes it is your best friend's husband and sometimes it's your father. It's weird. But that's a fact of life.

Life doesn't go on forever, and you don't want to drop dead without ever having done what you wanted to do.

As a person with the retentive mental capacity of a goldfish and a dislike of repetition, I frequently make use of the thesaurus built into my Microsoft Word U.K. Software.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

It's a strange sensation to live inside another person's life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling.

In my experience, adults rarely bother reading the reviews of children's books and almost never read the books themselves - particularly if they don't have children.