Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

The first move here is a sly bit of self-mythmaking: Mahy claims an originality so stubborn it can’t even borrow. “Too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else’s” reads like modesty and bravado braided together, the kind of line that protects a writer from the dreaded charge of imitation while quietly insisting on a singular inner engine. It’s not that she’s uninfluenced; it’s that influence, for her, must arrive as fuel rather than blueprint.

Then she pivots, and the real craft credo emerges. What she wants from other people isn’t plot or premise but texture: “imagery,” “flow of language,” “games with words.” That’s a children’s author telling you, without condescension, that the world’s most serious material is how language feels in the mouth. The “outside world” matters not as raw realism but as a living soundscape, a public commons of phrasing and rhythm she can metabolize into fiction.

The last clause widens the lens: “ideas about relationships” sits beside wordplay as equally “important.” That pairing signals Mahy’s deeper agenda: linguistic delight isn’t decoration, it’s a way into intimacy, misunderstanding, power, tenderness. In context, it fits an author who wrote fantastical, playful books that still take children’s emotional lives seriously. The subtext is a refusal of the false split between artful language and human stakes; for Mahy, words are the relationship.