Top 40 Margaret Mahy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Will you still love me when I’m a monster?”

— Margaret Mahy

2. “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing twice.”

— Margaret Mahy

3. “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

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

— Margaret Mahy

5. “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

6. “Fear can give you urgent wings.”

— Margaret Mahy

7. “Canadians are Americans with no Disneyland.”

— Margaret Mahy

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again.”

— Margaret Mahy

13. “You can’t say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.”

— Margaret Mahy

14. “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

15. “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.”

— Margaret Mahy

16. “There’s a lot of things you can put up with, as long as you’re not related to them.”

— Margaret Mahy

17. “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

18. “I don’t think I prefer writing for one age group above another. I am just as pleased with a story which I feel works well for very small children as I do with a story for young adults.”

— Margaret Mahy

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Margaret Mahy

25. “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

26. “I know things are unbearable but in spite of that we have to bear them.”

— Margaret Mahy

27. “I don’t want to die, really. I’m interested in what happens next, so I’ve got to keep on.”

— Margaret Mahy

28. “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

29. “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

30. “It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.”

— Margaret Mahy

31. “I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing.”

— Margaret Mahy

32. “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

33. “I’m the Beast. You’re the Beauty,” he said. “It’s all a story, isn’t it?”

— Margaret Mahy

34. “In a way, the characters often do take over.”

— Margaret Mahy

35. “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

36. “At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.”

— Margaret Mahy

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else’s life.”

— Margaret Mahy

42. “Every writer has to find their own way into writing.”

— Margaret Mahy

43. “Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored.”

— Margaret Mahy

44. “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

45. “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