Quotes from Marcus Sedgwick

Anything that might occur in 'story-time' could ultimately not be stranger than the utter oddity of the 'real-world.

Cold didn't worry him unduly. Given that his normal body temperature was way below human levels, the dip in the river had been no more than refreshing, certainly not deadly.

What you are saying and the way you are saying it are very closely linked. I discovered that I always had to let the book I was writing find its own style. Only in that way can you be sure that you are doing the right thing by your subject matter. It's a strange feeling -- as if the book has a life of its own.

Temporal grace,' said the Doctor. 'No weapons can function inside the TARDIS – even something as simple as a spear.

The war continues with no sign that it will end [...]. It's like an avalanche, started by a single gunshot, but which roars down the mountain more loudly than a thousand canons.

along a long narrow passageway, which opened into a hall, and they saw

The time for princes and tsars and grand duchesses and especially holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, of murder and assassination. The bear had already become what it had been waiting to be, and the men who set it on its journey changed too. Lev became Trotsky, Vladimir took the name Lenin, and they stepped into a bright and furious modern world; blood red, and snow white.

He was feeling something we all feel once in a while: why me?

I don't know if he gets all of it, but he loves it anyway, and you don't have to understand everything about something to love it, do you? In fact sometimes that can make you love something more.

That is how the dead survive: they live in our memories, and some of the times that is a good thing and beautiful, and other times it is not good, and then the dead are like a virus in the blood, an infection of the mind. Then,

That is how the dead survive: they live in our memories, and some of the times that is a good thing and beautiful, and other times it is not good, and then the dead are like a virus in the blood, an infection of the mind.

And none of you stand so tall, a pink moon gonna get you all.

Orwell's vision of our terrible future [...] - the world in which books are banned. What is Huxley's horrific vision? It is a world where there is no need for books to be banned, because no one can be bothered to read them'.

Something else: it always struck me as troubling that the words in books are printed in black and white, when life is anything but. The binary colour of words on a page give the sense of simplicity and clarity. But life doesn't work like that.

There never was a story that was happy through and through

When people burn books, it's because they're afraid of what's inside them, and there's the thing: to be afraid of the contents means that they have power.

But some of our choices are bigger, not massive, but bigger, and they have an impact on the people around us: shall I help that old lady with her shopping, or not? Shall I say something kind to you when I meet you? Shall I laugh at your ideas, shall I walk through the world gently, or shall I push everyone aside?

If I can see the future, then what does that mean? It would be like knowing the end of a story right from the start, almost as if you were reading it backwards. And who wants to know how their own story ends?

I've always said that no matter how bad a book; if it is successful then it is fulfilling some function, it has some strong points, there must be something good about it, or it would have been consigned to oblivion.

try thinking the same thing by darkness and see how different if feels.

Why were there some people who seemed so sure of themselves that it made him feel small and ignorant by comparison, as if they had a script to life with all the answers on it? He felt he didn't even know the questions.

And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it.

When we read a book, though, we call it ours, don't we, and I have always said that's because readers make a book their own through reading it. They do half the work, with their own imaginations, fleshing things out, painting each character and place and event in more detail than we have actually set out on paper, and we writers merely set the readers on their way.

For fiction is not about life; it's about the troubles in life. That is why we read it. To understand, to grow, to believe, to hope. That all the troubles one faces in life can be overcome, eventually.