Quotes by New Zealander/New Zealand authors (page 2)

"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, Author

"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, Author

"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, Author

"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, Author

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

Margaret Mahy, Author

"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, Author

"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, Author

"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, Author

"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, Author

"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, Author

"The Slave Trade, though nominally abolished, is actively pursued here, eighty-three slaves having been landed just before my arrival, and another cargo during my stay"

George Grey, Leader

"Sunrise offered a very beautiful spectacle; the water was quite unruffled, but the motion communicated by the tides was so great that, although there was not a breath of air stirring, the sea heaved slowly with a grand and majestic motion"

George Grey, Leader

"Part of my plan was not only to introduce all useful animals that I possibly could into this part of Australia, but also the most valuable plants of every description"

George Grey, Leader

"I mention this fact as tending to support what I have often heard stated, namely, that a shark's sense of smell is so keen that, if men ever bathe in seas where they are found, a shark is almost sure to appear directly afterwards"

George Grey, Leader

"All the principal people in the town are concerned in the slave trade, and their chief wealth consists in the number of slaves they possess; therefore there is little chance of the trade being, for many years, totally abolished"

George Grey, Leader

"To sleep after sunrise was impossible on account of the number of flies which kept buzzing about the face"

George Grey, Leader

"Spanish alone was understood or spoken here; our friend, the countryman, stuck to us most nobly, he understood us not a bit better than the rest but saw that we were in distress and would not desert us"

George Grey, Leader

"This part of Brazil offered the curious spectacle of a great evil, which has been long suffered to exist and is now advancing, gradually yet surely, to that state which must entail inevitable destruction on the existing Government of the country"

George Grey, Leader

"In front of us lay a smooth sandy beach, beyond which rose gradually a high wooded country, and behind us was the sea, studded with numerous islands of every variety of form"

George Grey, Leader

"They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"They meant abnormal. Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"I like to see life with its teeth out"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"Equality and development will not be achieved however if peace is not understood from women's' point of view"

Jenny Shipley, Statesman

"I only have so much energy, so something had to go. This is why, at the end of the day, I've preserved my sanity for the children and also manage to do my best at work"

Kiri Te Kanawa, Musician

"It makes it very exciting don't you think to live in an age of, of discovery of human personality this way?"

John Money, Psychologist

"The world has been gradually reducing its nuclear arsenals. Testing must stop so that progress on the destruction of nuclear weapons may begin"

Jenny Shipley, Statesman

"The serious problems facing the world today will never be solved until women are able to use their full potential on behalf of themselves, their families, and their global and local communities, as the World Bank and others have discovered"

Jenny Shipley, Statesman

"New Zealand's taken some very significant decisions in relation to defence in the last two years"

Jenny Shipley, Statesman

"I can't for the life of me see that by being permissive you actually assist anyone"

Jenny Shipley, Statesman

"Laboratories can reduce risk by implementing a proven and internationally accepted quality assurance technology that is applicable across the globe"

Richard Curtis, Writer

"I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text"

Richard Curtis, Writer

"Again, we turn down most books that have been self-published unless they have a special track record. We have taken a small number on, however, and sold them to major publishers for a nice sum. But that is an exception to the rule"

Richard Curtis, Writer

"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces"

Peter Arnett, Journalist

"The Platform for Action gives due emphasis to the fact that women globally have continued to have insufficient access to the resources necessary to achieve economic independence"

Jenny Shipley, Statesman

"The Open Skies issue is something that's ongoing and we understand that there are issues in Australia that need to be sorted out. It's something that I think over time there's an opportunity for us and we'll work on that in a progressive way"

Jenny Shipley, Statesman

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Quotes by New Zealander authors