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"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."
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"Employers are at their happiest on Mondays. Employees are at their happiest on Fridays."

"Back then, work revolved around life. Today, life revolves around work."

"Love by the sweat of thy brow.Not through whispered words of hollow sound or lofty dreams ne'er substance bound that more than oft do run aground. Nay, love with mighty, blistered hands that turn the soil and carve the land. A bearer of toil and golden band. Be strong! A founder of the feast! Protective knight who slays the beast! For promises and vows aloud are naught but wispy veneer shroud like cobwebs, frail, the airy words and wooing fail. So work, my darling. Toil as proof. Thy loyal heart be drained of youth and yet beat on, incessant sound. Both feet take root within the ground, and service be thy kingly crown.Love by the sweat of thy brow."

"Your life content reduces with employment."

"A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization."
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."

"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."

"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."
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