Quotes from Margaret Mahy

I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been.

New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications.

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.

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.

Ellis's understanding of himself and the world around him certainly develops because of his adventures, and part of that development comes through recognizing other people for what they are.

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.

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing twice.

I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.

Fear can give you urgent wings.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

And, Heriot's hand on Cayley's shoulder, they set off through the moonlight midnight orchard, moving deeper and deeper into their overlapping fairy tales, vigilant and wary, for there were no safe places for the Magician and the Warrior.

The shop for fuller figures could be seen through broad, green leaves, its windows full, not of dresses, but fat zeros, pot-bellied legless sixes and bosomy eights, and threes like pregnant, primitive goddesses. In the teashop the chairs were being stood on top of the tables and made a forest of their own, sprouting upwards in fountains of coloured leaves.

and after all, if I really wanted the bay to stay totally untouched, I wouldn't be living here myself, would I?" said her mother's voice out in the kitchen. I'd live in the city, and just enjoy the idea of the bay, pure and untouched between bare hills. But we built this house didn't we? We dug into the slope and levelled the space and poured the concrete foundations.

It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.

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.

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?

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.

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

It's so dark - as if all the lights are just there to make the other places seem darker.

Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I'm sharing my name with you. I'm putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don't listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy. you'll make a hole in him through which he'll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we'll smile together, me inside, you outside. We'll crush him between our smiles.

What's happened to the world? she was thinking. Everything has turned terrible...and the bits that aren't terrible have gone mad. I don't understand anything anymore.

Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine,innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have a quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin.

Pulverized by literature,' thought Miss Laburnum. 'The ideal way for a librarian to die.

Will you still love me when I'm a monster?