Meg Rosoff Quotes

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.

All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between 'reality' and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it's not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

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.

I read a lot of bad scripts and weird television shows. I don't know. There's a lot of work out there I was reading at 14 years old and noticing this lack of thought. And then, reading 'Afterschool,' that's full of thought. It was bursting with ideas.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it?

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

A story is a story is a story. The only difference is in the techniques you bring to bear. There are always limitations on what you can and can't do. But I enjoy that. Just like when you write a sonnet or haiku, there are rules you have to abide by. And to me, playing within the rules is the fun part. It keeps the brain fresh.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.