English - Author | October 5, 1947 - March 2, 2015
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.
Mal Peet
PrivacySittingBeyondThingsCommon
After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.
MoneyBookWriteYearsBeingKeeper
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.
ChildrenGreatMeWritingReading
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.
HistoryWaitRoadBurgerTrafficUs
Normally, I'm a grumpy old man - whenever I read about celebrity, I start to grind my teeth and pull my hair; it seems synonymous with idiocy.
ManHairStartOld ManGrindTeeth
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.
MediaWayHeroesThingsModernEcho
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.
HappyTheatreBlackLongYouBox
Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.
BookVarietyOnlyNecessaryRead
Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.
PastPoliticalConsequences
'Keeper' is about fathers, ultimately. and also conservation, commitment and ambition.
CommitmentAmbitionConservationAlso
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.
PartnershipsInterestingDoingRules
If I were to try to describe the way in which I write, the only word I would use without qualification is 'slowly.'
WayTryWriteWithoutOnlyWould
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