Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Mahy

Mahy compresses a whole apprenticeship into two plain sentences: the long, grinding lag between wanting a life in words and earning one. The first line is almost stubbornly unromantic. No myth of the overnight breakthrough, no talk of “calling” as instant destiny. Just time, waiting, and the quietly brutal economics of art. By leading with “I had to wait,” she frames writing not as inspiration but as endurance - a practice that has to survive rent, doubt, and the ordinary humiliations of being unpublished or underpaid.

Then she pivots: “However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be.” The “however” matters. It’s a refusal to let scarcity rewrite identity. She’s naming a tension familiar to creative work: the world may not validate you for years, but desire can still be a kind of proof. The child in the sentence isn’t nostalgia; it’s evidence. Mahy is arguing that the impulse precedes the credential, that authorship starts as a private commitment long before it becomes a public job title.

Context sharpens the point. As a New Zealand writer who built an international reputation largely in children’s and young adult literature - a field often patronized as “lesser” art - Mahy’s insistence on wanting this “from the time I was a child” reads like a subtle reclaiming. She suggests the imagination of childhood isn’t something to outgrow; it’s the engine that eventually pays the bills, if you can outlast the waiting.