Mal Peet Quotes

In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

My sixth book, 'A Breath of Snow and Ashes,' was nominated for a number of book awards, one of which was The Quill Award, and they had it in New York at the Natural History Museum.

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

'The Da Vinci Code' is the most popular book of our times.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there.

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

One good thing about leaving daily journalism was that I was no longer obliged to read all the book prize short lists.

Nicholas Sparks and John Green are very different writers.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.

John Green was on the set of 'The Fault In Our Stars' the entire time, which is amazing! Wouldn't you want John Green on set the entire time?

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.