Mal Peet

“'Keeper' is about fathers, ultimately. and also conservation, commitment and ambition.”

“He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.”

“Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters; it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.”

“The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.”

“I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.”

“Exposure is about, among other things, the ferocity of the press and the way - in an echo of some of Shakespeare's plays - the modern media creates heroes to destroy them.”

“It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.”

“I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.”

“When I'm working, I always read stuff that's as far away from what I'm working on as possible, so I'll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.”

“I used to play all the time. I would play football when it was light and read when it was dark.”

“I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.”

“History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.”

“Benches and books have things in common beyond the fact that they're generally to do with sitting. Both are forms of public privacy, intimate spaces widely shared.”

“I have kind of a personality defect in that I find the word 'no' hard to articulate.”

“I want to entertain, but I also want to push the barriers beyond what kids are conditioned into accepting.”

“It was weird - writing is a stupid thing to do. I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I'm a black South American football superstar; then I have to imagine I'm a female pop celebrity who's pregnant. It's a completely mad way to spend your time.”