Margaret Mahy Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“Every writer has to find their own way into writing.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“I know things are unbearable but in spite of that we have to bear them.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“Family!... You might just as well celebrate battle, murder and sudden death.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“I don't want to die, really. I'm interested in what happens next, so I've got to keep on.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“Will you still love me when I'm a monster?”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it?”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“There are always two people involved in cruelty, aren't there? One to be vicious and someone to suffer! And what's the use of getting rid of - of wickedness, say - in the outside world if you let it creep back into things from inside you?”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“I am really chained to my computer these days so I work in my bedroom, which is a room I have worked in for years and years. It is just as much an office as a bedroom, and during the day, my bed is rather like an extension of my desk.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing twice.”
-- Margaret Mahy -
“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 ...”
-- Margaret Mahy
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