There will be outrage and disgust and people will turn on me at the last, they will hate me, my reputation will forever be destroyed, my punishment earned, self-inflicted like this gunshot wound, and the world will finally know that I was the greatest feather man of them all.
Sitting around miserable all day won’t make you any happier.
In his heart, he knew that there was no reason to be impolite to someone, even if they did work for you. There was such a thing as manners after all.
Children’s book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn’t know how to write a children’s book – which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it’s the other way around.
But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.
The dot that became a speck that became a blob that became a figure that became a boy.
Well you’ve been brought here against your will, just like I have. If you ask me, we’re all in the same boat. And it’s leaking.
He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.
He suddenly became convinced that if he didn’t do something sensible, something to put his mind to some use, then before he knew it he would be wondering round the streets having fights with himself and inviting domestic animals to social occasions too.
You’re my best friend, Shmuel,’ he said. ‘My best friend for life.
It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you’ve ever known before.
There is cruelty in the world Eliza, you can see that, can’t you? It surrounds us. It breathes on us. We spend our life trying to escape it.
With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children’s books, I feel I need some distance. I don’t want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice.
It’s not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing.
I was dropped by my publisher after my first two books. But I always believed in myself.
I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I’m going to learn, if I’m going to research, it’s probably going to lead me to writing a novel.
Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.
Bruno: Why do you wear pajamas all day? Shmuel: The soldiers. They took all our clothes away. Bruno: My dad’s a soldier, but not the sort that takes people’s clothes away.
It reminds me of how grandmother always had the right costume for me to wear. You wear the right outfit and you feel like the person you’re pretending to be.
I think that books for young people should have serious and important themes, they shouldn’t be trivial. So the books I write, they would be the kind of stories you would write in an adult novel only they just happen to feature a child at the center of them.