Quotes from Geraldine McCaughrean

I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

Never apologise for not being someone else. You're bound to find something you're good at, even if it's only writing stories.

I'm not one of those people who had a burning passion for 'Peter Pan' all my life. Although I can't remember a time when I didn't know the story, I didn't carry around with me an ambition to one day write the sequel.

My brother, whom I adored, typed out a children's book illustrated by himself... at the age of 14. My sister, with whom I always shared a double bed, had that effortless superiority of someone six years older and anxious to show it. But we were each as shy as voles. It seemed safer to keep to each other's company.

You sort of suspect if a book's fun to write, it will be fun to read.

It isn't that I don't tackle issues; it's just that they're secondary to giving somebody an escape route from the banal routine of everyday life.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

I wept my way through teaching practice.

'Would I mind if someone wrote a sequel to one of my books?' I asked myself, and I decided that I wouldn't, providing that the writer was respectful, had read my book first, and wasn't drunk when doing it.

I still keep thinking someone will penetrate my guilty secret - that I have been masquerading as a writer all these years while all I was really doing was enjoying myself, pursuing my passion.

When people write fan-fic sequels to one of your books, it gives you a very strange feeling. It is very flattering but strange, as if the characters have come to life again without you knowing.

The one thing that makes writing a better pastime than reading is that you can make things turn out the way you want in the end!

He is everything, everything, everything I ever admired and wanted and couldn't have. He is everything I needed and couldn't find in real life. Of course he is. That's why I invented him.

As far as the eye could see, black rocks broke through the waves and tore the surf to shreds of white.

Summer died under the weight of fallen leaves and autumn filled up the ruts in the road with rainwater like blood filling fresh clawmarks.

His heart cannoned like a billiard ball off some green wall of his innards.

The world is hollow. It's a lot to take in. Like cracking an egg and finding nothing inside. Or a full grown elephant.

La palabra ADIÓS es la más difícil de escribir de todas las palabras del mundo.

Like everything perfect, he set up a ferocious pain inside me -- a flickering, gripping sort of pain, because nothing as marvelous as that is ever within reach, is it? Nothing as beautiful can ever last.

Is he talking Latin?' said the Yeoman. 'No,' said Hubert, 'but I'll be damned if it's the English my mother taught me.

For if a man is melancholy, laughter is as far from his heart as land from a drowning man

El único problema que tienen los sueños es que no puedes elegir cuáles te tocan.

It was as if a lifetime's wisdom and peacefulness had found its way into her head while she was still young.

Lord Jesus Christ is the touchstone which can turn all our deeds to gold,' he said anxiously. 'I pray He can forgive that lie of mine.