Quotes by New Zealander authors

"If you want to be a successful runner, you have to consider everything. It's no good just thinking about endurance and not to develop fine speed"

"No one will burn out doing aerobic running. It is too much anaerobic running, which the American scholastic athletic system tends to put young athletes through, that burns them out"

"As a teenager I had no idea that I had the potential to win an Olympic gold medal and my athletic career developed only by lucky circumstances"

"Running became boring because it's so predictable. I got to a point where I knew what my competition could do"

"It's just a matter of understanding what's necessary and discipline yourself to do it"

"Encourage kids to enjoy running and play in athletics. Don't force them to run too much competition"

"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"

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting"

"Ellis's understanding of himself and the world around him certainly develops because of his adventures, and part of that development comes through recognizing other people for what they are"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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 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"

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

"In a way, the characters often do take over"

"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"

"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"

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

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

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"Every writer has to find their own way into writing"

"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"