Quotes from John Marsden

I wondered how long an adult could talk to a kid without using the word "but." About forty seconds'd be the record for most of them and that's on a good day.

A beggar who goes fishing may use a worm which has feasted on a king as his bait. And the fisherman may eat the fish caught with that bait. What does this tells us? Well, it tells us that a king may progress through the guts of a pauper.

Action is its own kind of thinking. We had to fight now: these people were a cancer who had crept into our stomachs and infected us all. We had to be surgeons, bold and clever, not thinkers and talkers.

I knew then the answer to my question; the question I'd asked myself many times during this war, and many more times since it ended. When would I be able to put the war behind me? When would I be able to forget it? And I knew now that the answer was simple. Never. I never would. Some things end. But war never does.

We've all had to rewrite the scripts of our lives the last few weeks. We've learnt a lot and we've had to figure out what's important, what matters – what really matters. It's been quite a time.

Silence, sometimes my fortress, always my prison.

Some people wake up drowsy. Some people wake up energized. I wake up dead.

There's life in his face again. It occurs to me that this is the best thing I could have done, it's actually a great way to leave, because it's giving Gavin the message that we haven't been defeated, we are up for it, we're young, we're in control of our lives again, we can charge into the future with confidence. When we round the corner of the driveway I take his hand and we run down to the gate together.

A farm is just an accumulation of stories really. Same with people... "A farmer's footsteps are the best fertiliser," Dad used to say, which just means that the more you walk around your place the better everything seems to grow and flourish.

Just because school's boring so much of the time, that doesn't mean kids don't want to learn.

mind. Your feelings might be coming

I've heard enough about what you want to do; now tell me what needs doing

Instead of blaming us, find your true enemy. And, where the offence is, there let the great axe fall.

So I've started writing again. It passes the time. No, I'll be honest, it does more than that. It gets stuff out of my head and heart and puts it on paper. That doesn't mean it's no longer in my head and heart. It's still there. But once I've written about it, seems like there's more room inside me again. More room for other things.

Wer diese Worte liest - was für ein Bild bekommt er von mir? […] Kein hübsches Bild. Die Worte lügen also, in gewisser Hinsicht jedenfalls. Wie immer.

Like I said, they can be pretty crazy, horses. Not as sensible as sheep.

Parenting means teaching children to get their own Weet-Bix.

I mean that the more confident people are about their beliefs, the more likely they are to be wrong. It's the ones who are so certain, so black and white, the ones who never consider that they could be wrong or that anyone else could be right, they're the ones who scare me. When you're not confident at least you keep checking what you do and asking yourself if you're on the right track.

Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.

I began to think the damage to our country, to us even, went so deep now that it would never fully be repaired. I realised the worst damage wasn't the bombed buildings, the burnt-out cars, the shattered windows. It wasn't even the neglected farms and the holes in the fences and the crops gone to seed. It was the damage deep inside us. Words like spirit and soul started to mean more to me now.

All I got out of it was a terrible feeling that I was a disgusting human being. It was so against everything I stood for, everything I believed in. The next day I felt awful. I had a terrible headache anyway, and my stomach felt like it was still doing slow spins, but worse, far worse, was the way I felt such a slut. I felt sick at myself.

Then the day came when we stopped playing. We'd gone a couple of months without our usual games, but a few days into the school holidays I got my dolls out and tried to start up again. And it had all gone. The magic didn't work any more. I could barely even remember how we'd done it, but I tried to recapture the mood, the storylines, the way the dolls had moved and thought and spoken. But now it was like reading a meaningless book.

No, Hell wasn't anything to do with places, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.

So what are violinists? Well, I think they're really sensitive, and kind of deep.