Margaret Mahy Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

a man who builds a house never really dies.

Canadians are Americans with no Disneyland.

Do you think that clothes have a life of their own, and maybe have unsuitable affairs with opposite styles? I mean - you look at some people - their clothes go on flirting long after the people inside them have lost interest.

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 ...

When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.

I've never actually been a fighter myself - fighting tires me out and I'm not an efficient fighter anyway - but I have certainly seen other people have great complicated goes at one another.