Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

The line opens with a bait-and-switch: a tidy origin story ("about seven") immediately undercut by the blunt corrective, "but of course it is not as simple as that". Mahy knows the cultural hunger for the myth of the destined child-artist, the neat anecdote that flatters readers and publishers alike. Then she punctures it, not with melodrama but with logistics: rent, jobs, evenings, late nights. The romance of vocation gets replaced by the rhythm of labor.

What makes it work is the quiet insistence that identity is both chosen and constructed. "I decided" asserts agency and early certainty, but the rest of the sentence argues that decision alone doesn't confer permission, time, or a career. The subtext is a critique of how we misread artistic lives: we treat talent as a lightning strike and ignore the long, unphotogenic stretch where art survives in the margins of adulthood.

There's also a class-and-gendered realism tucked inside "had to work at other things". For much of Mahy's era, writing rarely paid reliably, and for many women especially, creative ambition coexisted with expectations of practicality. Her emphasis on nighttime work evokes a life lived in two shifts: the public self that earns, the private self that makes.

Context matters: Mahy became a major figure in children's literature, a field often patronized as "easy" or instinctive. This is her reminder that books for young readers aren't conjured; they're produced the hard way, over years, by someone who kept choosing the page when the day was already spent.