A biography for Mal Peethasn’t been written yet.
“It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.”
“It's a nonsense because, as we all know, there are brilliant 15-year-old readers and hopeless 50-year-old readers. All that categorisation is a matter of bookshop shelves rather than literary categories, I think.”
“I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.”
“Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.”
“I'm going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It's like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he's stuck - in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.”
“What I value in books is lucidity. I want the language to be rich; I love lexical fireworks on the page, but I have to know what it means. I want to be surprised and delighted, not merely baffled.”
“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.”
“I tend to boycott all teenage reading while I'm trying to write my own stuff.”
“I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.”
“Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.”
“Remember that a good football novel has to have the same ingredients as any other good novel: drama, convincing and interesting characters, a strong story-line, and some kind of magic in the writing.”
“Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.”
“Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.”
“Writing is a form of licensed madness.”
“If I were to try to describe the way in which I write, the only word I would use without qualification is 'slowly.'”
“'Smart', in American usage, is slicker and sharper than 'intelligent'; faster off the mark and quicker on its feet than deep thought.”
“I never knew that Americans would take up soccer, and it's a gender-free sport in high school there.”
“Bootworks' Black Box Theatre has a maximum seating capacity of two - as long as one of you is happy to sit on the other's lap.”
“I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.”
“The very provision of benches by the council or the corporation acknowledges the human need to be private in public, to be conspicuously idle, to have nothing better to do.”