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

Categorized in : Thinking Mean Flirting

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

writing attitude believe

Family!... You might just as well celebrate battle, murder and sudden death.

Margaret Mahy

murder battle might

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

Margaret Mahy

best-effort work jobs

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

stories character ideas

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

Margaret Mahy

related long

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

proof-of-love sight people

Canadians are Americans with no Disneyland.

Margaret Mahy

disneyland canada

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

vocabulary differences character

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

Margaret Mahy

situation term humans

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

Margaret Mahy

beast stories said

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

buying-things shopping mind

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

mother friendship children

Fear can give you urgent wings.

Margaret Mahy

fear wings giving

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

different reading writing

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

writing people ideas

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

simple night years

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

Margaret Mahy

ignored mean

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

Margaret Mahy

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

Margaret Mahy

support reading writing

a man who builds a house never really dies.

Margaret Mahy

architecture house men