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"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."
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"The real beauty of a house is always the happiness inside that house!"

"We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did-a reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now vindicated grandparents. And you thought God had no sense of humor."

"Grandchildren are their grandparents' toys."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Mahy

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."
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