Margaret Mahy Quotes

• 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

• 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.

  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

• 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

• 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.

  Margaret Mahy

• 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.

  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

• 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.

  Margaret Mahy

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

  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

• 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

• 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.

  Margaret Mahy

• In a way, the characters often do take over.

  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

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

  Margaret Mahy

• 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.

  Margaret Mahy

• I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else’s, but I find that other people’s imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

  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.

  Margaret Mahy

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

  Margaret Mahy

• I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.

  Margaret Mahy

Margaret Mahy (29)

Birth:	21st March, 1936
Death:	23rd July, 2012
Nationality:	New Zealander
Profession:	Librarian, Novelist

About

Margaret Mahy was a New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. Many of her story plots have strong supernatural elements but her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up. She wrote more than 100 picture books, 40 novels and 20 collections of short stories. At her death she was one of thirty writers to win the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her "lasting contribution to children's literature".

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Today's Anniversary - 13th April

Births

• 1906 - Samuel Beckett
• 1970 - Richard Bartlett Schroder Jr.
• 1939 - Seamus Heaney
• 1909 - Eudora Welty
• 1828 - Joseph Barber Lightfoot

Deaths

• 1993 - Wallace Stegner
• 1794 - Nicolas Chamfort
• 2006 - Muriel Spark
• 1880 - Robert Fortune
• 1975 - Max Gluckman