Margaret Mahy Quotes - Page 2

At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.

There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and "live" with the characters.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing.

I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it?

Family!... You might just as well celebrate battle, murder and sudden death.

Time was too much a part of love, for even in fairytales the proof of love was not its first moment, but its latest ones - that people lived happily ever after. Love at first sight was nothing but infatuation until proved by time.

I know things are unbearable but in spite of that we have to bear them.

There's a lot of things you can put up with, as long as you're not related to them.

When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss.

Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

Fear can give you urgent wings.

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can "take over" as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation.

Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.

Canadians are Americans with no Disneyland.

a man who builds a house never really dies.

For in some ways the world was like a shopping centre, and he himself was a doubtful customer, often ineffectual, being talked into buying things he didn't want, things indeed which nobody in their right mind would want to buy.

When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.