Peet Quotes & Sayings

Yes, I still think of him as that, call him that. It's as real as any of his other names. — Mal Peet

You have to put your own oxygen mask before you put on others ... It's a good metaphor for parenting — Amanda Peet

I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years. — Mal Peet

I have a fairly realistic idea about what my gifts and limitations are. — Amanda Peet

I don't really see any barrier between teenage fiction and adult literature. — Mal Peet

I think you have to be in an insane stratosphere in terms of fame in order to get offered really well-written scripts. Amanda Peet is definitely not in that group. — Amanda Peet

I certainly don't believe in love at first sight. I definitely believe in a lot of chemistry and lust at first sight. I think that love is something that takes work. — Amanda Peet

I always begin my stories as experiments - on large yellow tablets - a mixture of writing and sketching. — Bill Peet

I try to write stories that will attract younger readers and make them feel part of a wider readership. I do not feel able to write books that are about, or even for, teenagers; and I am inclined to be suspicious of books which 'target' them. — Mal Peet

'Smart', in American usage, is slicker and sharper than 'intelligent'; faster off the mark and quicker on its feet than deep thought. — Mal Peet

We should just bomb them back to the Stone Age. — Mal Peet

I was a bit odd. I read books and wanted to draw and go to art school. — Mal Peet

Rigid geometry forced in varied curves is "mother," / is "nature," is systematic violation." Muy Bueno. / This device is for you, the mutilated of no art. — Christian Peet

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. — Mal Peet

Fluke me, Murdstone. — Mal Peet

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. — Mal Peet

Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together. — Mal Peet

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. — Mal Peet

I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff. — Amanda Peet

Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all. — Mal Peet

There aren't many roles that are interesting if you're a 40-year-old woman, unless you're Julia Roberts or Cate Blanchett. — Amanda Peet

I used to play all the time. I would play football when it was light and read when it was dark. — Mal Peet

I'm technologically an imbecile. But I do use the camera phone! — Amanda Peet

I'm a big fan of gallows humor. When my aunt passed away, she was in a coma for a day before my cousins pulled the plug. And the amount of joking and base humor that went on that day around her bed was so insane. It's crazy how people talk when something horrible is happening. — Amanda Peet

Nancy has her vision and she's a formidable force to be reckoned with, and that's similar to most of the male directors I've worked with. The only difference is probably inbetween scenes, gossiping with Diane Keaton, Frances McDormand and Nancy Meyers about who's had Botox and who hasn't. — Amanda Peet

In a romantic comedy, it's usually a good idea to have people who can't stand the fact that they are attracted to each other. — Amanda Peet

I don't know if those things work, where you do, like, this crash diet or crash starvation. It's just not something I've ever been into. — Amanda Peet

Weak banks endangered sovereigns that were called upon to save them, and weak sovereigns endangered banks holding bonds at risk of default. Recession worsened the debt ratio, but austerity to reduce borrowing suppressed growth, or caused even worse recession. — John Peet

Well, my mom is single and we've both been single at the same time over the last ten years, so I really related to the bond between my character and Diane's. — Amanda Peet

The thing I noticed about Jack was when we did a reading of the script, just to warm up. — Amanda Peet

I would do a musical, but I can't sing. — Amanda Peet

I don't clean, I don't make the bed. I spend my salary. I worry a lot. I just don't worry about socks on the floor. — Amanda Peet

Yoyo said to me recently, 'Love and pain, that's what families are, and they fit together like this'--he slotted the tips of our fingers together--'like cogs.' Then he smiled and put a hand on my swollen belly. 'And what makes these cogs turn is hope, of course. — Mal Peet

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. — Mal Peet

Ah, 6655321, think on the divine suffering. Meditate on that, my boy.' And all the time he had this rich manny von of Scotch on him, and then he went off to his little cantora to peet some more. So I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns and then the cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better that there was something in it. While the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga that was the heighth of Roman fashion. So being in Staja 84F was not all that wasted, and the Governor himself was very pleased to hear that I had taken to like Religion, and that was where I had my hopes. — Anthony Burgess

I want to drink champagne from ladies' shoes. — Mal Peet

Writing is a form of licensed madness. — Mal Peet

I'd love to work with Joan Cusack again - I'm obsessed with Joan Cusack. — Amanda Peet

In my seaside town, there is a plethora of benches, each one bearing a little brass plate commemorating a deceased occupant. You sit with ghosts. — Mal Peet

I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other. — Amanda Peet

What I'm trying to explain to my sulky little cousin is that we are doing things backwards. We are going from the end of the river to the start of the river. And endings are always sad. We are doing the sad bit first, which is wrong. Strange. — Mal Peet

Shit! Those sons a bitches Russians! — Mal Peet

If you weren't here and Oma died, I'd deal with it. Because there'd be nothing more to lose. It'd be just me. But now it's different; it's worse. Because you're yet another person to lose. You do stupid, dangerous things, and every time you go away, I pray in agony that you'll come back. It's unfair. Hope is pulling me to pieces. I can't stand it. — Mal Peet

When you're an actor, you can be hindered by your own narcissism. — Amanda Peet

I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it. — Mal Peet

Mark and jay Duplass really like to improvise. Even if we beg them to go back to the script, they invariably ask us to go "off the rails," as they like to call it. It's just the way they work. You get a full written script. And it's really, really, really good, so that's why it's kind of peculiar that they always want you to improvise, because if I wrote something that good, I would want everyone to stick to the dialogue that was written. — Amanda Peet

Boredom had not been among the dangers that the SOE had prepared him for. No pompous little officer had stood in front of his class and said, "Right, chaps, today we're going to learn how to deal with a particularly nasty little situation that secret agents tend to find themselves in: being bored abso-bloody-lutely rigid". — Mal Peet

Being an actor is really, really hard, no matter how you slice it. — Amanda Peet

I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy. — Amanda Peet

Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple - sensitively - with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer. — Mal Peet

If you take 'Cheers' and 'Seinfeld' and watch the early shows, they're kind of awkward. It took a while for the writers and everything to gel. — Amanda Peet

I think network television is really hard because it has to sail right away. HBO's so much more nurturing, patient. They think it takes a while for a show to kind of congeal and figure out what its strong spots are. — Amanda Peet

I have to make little movies. I have to sit and film. — Mal Peet

I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories. — Mal Peet

Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to. — Mal Peet

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. — Mal Peet

I never knew that Americans would take up soccer, and it's a gender-free sport in high school there. — Mal Peet

I'm interested in people who are very close to the people who commit crimes. — Amanda Peet

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. — Mal Peet

I can explain to you why algebra is useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.' He moved his fingers gently on my temples. 'It's to keep what is in here healthy. PE for the head. And the great thing is you can do it sitting down. — Mal Peet

The past is a dark house, and we have only torches with dying batteries. It's probably best not to spend too much time in there in case the rotten floor gives way beneath our feet. — Mal Peet

I tend to boycott all teenage reading while I'm trying to write my own stuff. — Mal Peet

Keeper had shifted the limits of my world, or maybe simply rubbed them out. Now, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was preparing to take a free kick at me. It — Mal Peet

They talk about a lot of different things, but I think they definitely have the same school of thought as my husband [Games Of Thrones creator David Benioff], which is that the difference between being a writer and not being a writer is finishing. — Amanda Peet

I have a feeling there is no ideal situation, unless she could go back in time and be 22 again. I think some of it is just kind of the shock of realizing that you're approaching middle age, or that you are middle-aged and kind of coming to terms with that in whatever incremental ways. — Amanda Peet

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. — Mal Peet

I'd like to be someone on 'Games of Thrones.' — Amanda Peet

I am an author-illustrator of children's books - and yet - I must confess I don't do the books for the kids. When I'm working on a book I'm somewhere else - at the circus - or a rustic old farm - or deep in a forest - with no thought of who might read the book or what age group it would appeal to. I write them so I can illustrate them. — Bill Peet

As much use as tits on a fish. — Mal Peet

Philip Murdstone sat considering the phrase 'depths of despair'. Its plural implied that there were, even now, levels of it he had yet to experience. — Mal Peet

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. — Mal Peet

The view from here was lovely, constant, and never the same. Somehow, it was always sympathetic to his mood. — Mal Peet

I would have done anything. I just really love the Duplass brothers. I was at a place where I was desperate for good writing. It wasn't the part that attracted me to it; it was just to be able to work with them. And the fact that she's this kind of, like, loose cannon and this kind of desperate 40-year-old is just the icing on the cake. — Amanda Peet

Thank God in an atheist. — Mal Peet

I think it took me a long time to realize that you can't really score unless someone passes you the ball. The older you get as a woman, it's fewer and far between. The material isn't there. — Amanda Peet

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. — Mal Peet

I'm not a great reader of historical fiction; it's not my favourite genre. — Mal Peet

When I read "The Whole Nine Yards" I was like, 'Okay, this is a G-spot role'. — Amanda Peet

The three things that kept me sane as a child were bikes, books, and soccer — Mal Peet

Beauty is only skin deep. If you go after someone just because she's beautiful but don't have anything to talk about, it's going to get boring fast. You want to look beyond the surface and see if you can have fun or if you have anything in common with this person. — Amanda Peet

My writing philosophy is throwing spaghetti against the wall. That's how I take pictures, too. If I take 100, surely one will be good. — Amanda Peet

But I get ahead of myself, which is nearly as bad as getting Above Myself. — Mal Peet

I want to entertain, but I also want to push the barriers beyond what kids are conditioned into accepting. — Mal Peet

Let me tell you something. When there is a penalty kick, most people think that the penalty taker is in control. But they are wrong. The penalty taker is full of fear, because he is expected to score. He is under great pressure. He has many choices to make, and as he places the ball and walks back to make his run, his mind is full of the possibility of failure. This makes him vulnerable, and it makes the keeper very powerful. — Mal Peet

Whenever I was with Kevin Pollak, I had to leave the room. — Amanda Peet

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. — Mal Peet

A sentence that clots in your mouth is unlikely to flow in your mind. — Mal Peet

History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. 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. — Mal Peet

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. — Mal Peet

The US military and the CIA got busy working on plans for the conquest of Cuba. And it would be no Mickey Mouse boat operation this time. This time, Fidel Castro and his hairy henchmen would find out what it felt like to have American fighter-bombers drop the fires of hell on their heads three hundred times a day. — Mal Peet

I don't read reviews, as a rule. I can't, because I can't control myself. But I've heard that [the Duplasses] were happy, so that's good. — Amanda Peet

I'm so angry,' she said. 'I was all right until you came back. I'd given up. So many terrible things. Relatives, neighbors disappearing. Opa. The bloody Germans coming to...to strip us bare. Oma's silence. Bam, bam, bam. Like being punched over and over again. You get numb. It doesn't hurt anymore. Unless you start to hope. That's the trick, you see: you can take anything unless you start to hope. — Mal Peet

I wrote a play before that and it never saw the light of day. And then I started working on this play and it came out really quickly. Eventually I got it, and I wrote a letter to Sarah Jessica Parker and she wanted to do it. So that's how it happened. — Amanda Peet

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. — Mal Peet

I try to be really hippie about things. I'm uptight in all the ways that are really important, but the things my husband and family can benefit from my uptightness, I'm completely lacking. — Amanda Peet

Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year. — Mal Peet

I do recall how I got the ideas for some of my books. Many of them are a result of doodling. — Bill Peet

Unfortunately, however, weapons of mass destruction tend to attract maniacs: men - it's almost always men - who want to jab the red button and yell "Take that, you heathen infidel bastards!" and sit in their revolving chairs in underground lead-lined bunkers or caves, watching on their monitors World War III or the Final Jihad or whatever. — Mal Peet

Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children's writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull. — Mal Peet

I usually try on at least 20 pairs of jeans before I find something that looks good on me. And even then, I have a trustworthy friend tell me if my butt looks big! — Amanda Peet