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. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you’re trying to tell them. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps. – Meg Rosoff
My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing – the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
My daughter is a fantastic travelling companion – she’s totally organised, whereas I’m hopeless. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields. – Meg Rosoff
As a person with the retentive mental capacity of a goldfish and a dislike of repetition, I frequently make use of the thesaurus built into my Microsoft Word U.K. Software. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff
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. – Meg Rosoff