Meg Rosoff Quotations

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

There's an overwhelming sense of paranoia in the suburbs. People there seem so much more paranoid to me than people in the city about their kids being kidnapped or their parties being raided or their drinks being spiked. There's a kind of hysteria about that.

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

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.

The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever youre trying to tell them.

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

I've been fired five times for having a bad attitude.

I'd like to think life has improved since 1850, despite the long hours we all seem to spend slaving over hot computers, but the psychological journeys remain the same - the search for love, identity, a meaningful place in the world.

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

Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.

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

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.

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.

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.

Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.

I loved horses and horse books as a child.

I think most people struggle over a matter of years to find a satisfying way to live.

My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.

Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.

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.

When I was at university, there was such a strong delineation between city kids and those who had grown up the suburbs. City kids were so at home in the world, in a way that suburban kids take years to catch up, if indeed they ever can.

The thing about adolescence is that you are emerging from a state of obscurity. You are coming out into the world from your family. Your family can seem normal because it is your family and all you know, but in fact it is a mess.

I am quite a cheerful, dark person. On the outside, I'm optimistic but I expect the worst to happen.

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

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

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn't be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them - but there's no way I was touching those bugs.

I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields.

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

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.

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.

Nowadays, I only review books I really like. It's cowardly, I know, but I figure it's not my job to make people unhappy. I'll leave that to the professionals.

The more you live, the better writer you are.

It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading.

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.

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

I lived in New York for 10 years, and every New Yorker sees a shrink.

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.

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

In the odd moment when I am not thinking about horses, I write books.

A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.

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.

She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.' 'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?

I give thanks for all that has passed, for all that is passing, and for all that is yet to come.

Now let's try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn't exactly been on my list of Things to Do while visiting England,but I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.

The real truth is that the war didn't have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop.

The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance and because I liked how fierce the word looked

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

At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person.

I love you. I'm madly in love with you. Well, madly obviously, given I'm mad as a mudlark. But you saved my life. I'd be dead without you. And you're so good to me. And you love me too. How lucky is that? Amazing! Amazingly lucky. I can't live without you. You're my lucky charm." She felt a sudden desire to kill Justin's well-meaning friend.

I didn't seem to have that effect on anyone but it would have been a waste for both of us to be saints.

I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.

Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.

I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn't love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn't have to howl all night.

The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.

I can't even trust my own imaginary dog. How much lower can a person get?

I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.

Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.

It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

it was love, of course, though I didn't know it then and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees.

Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth.

I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.

I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.

The things that break your heart when you think there`s nothing left to break

If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about.

Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.

If you have the patience to wait and watch, history will reshape truth (weakest of all forces, and weightless) in the image of opinion. What really happened will cease to matter and, eventually, cease to exist.

Accept love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions.

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

I've noticed that the magic getting along with someone isn't really magic. If you break it down, you can see how it happens. You say something a bit off-center and see if they react. If they get it, they push it a bit further. Then it's your turn again. And theirs. And so on, until it's banter. Once it's banter, it's friendship.

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

I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.

I noticed that once you realize someone's watching you it's pretty hard not to find yourself watching them back.

If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.

It might go down better than appearing as a giant reptile encased in a ball of fire and forcing yourself on her.' 'WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BRING THAT UP?

After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.

Every war has turning points and every person too.

Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.

It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.

but all I could think was in New York that kid would have been stuck in a straitjacket practically from birth and dangled over a tank full of Educational Consultants and Remedial Experts all snapping at his ankles for the next twenty years arguing about his Special Needs and getting paid plenty for it.

And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond. And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.

Fate is trying to kill me. I miss my dog. What's a doctor going to say? You're not ill, you're mad as a muffin? They'll either lock me up or tell me to get a grip and no one will believe the truth anyway.

Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

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

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.