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" 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

City

Way

Years

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" I loved horses and horse books as a child. "

" 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. "

" I lived in New York for 10 years, and every New Yorker sees a shrink. "

" I have never written out of a desire to be controversial. "

" The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you're trying to tell them. "

" The more you live, the better writer you are. "

" I think most people struggle over a matter of years to find a satisfying way to live. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've been fired five times for having a bad attitude. "

" 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. "

" Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror. "

Meg Rosoff

Absolutely

Life

" 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

Kind

" 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. "

" Nowadays, I only review books I really like. It's cowardly, I know, but I figure it's not my job to make people unhappy. I'll leave that to the professionals. "

" It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading. "

" People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry. "

Meg Rosoff

Writing

People

" In the odd moment when I am not thinking about horses, I write books. "

" I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should. "

" I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn't be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them - but there's no way I was touching those bugs. "

" My husband is my most valuable resource. "

" I'm not sure I can write about America for the same reason I'm not sure I can write about adults - I have no critical distance on either place. "

" Every day a piano doesn't fall on my head is good luck. "

" My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind. "

Meg Rosoff

Life

Short

" 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. "

" Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on. "

" I am quite a cheerful, dark person. On the outside, I'm optimistic but I expect the worst to happen. "

Meg Rosoff

Person

Cheerful