Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

Mahy is quietly swatting away a familiar snobbery: the idea that “serious” writing lives at one altitude, and everything else is a training-wheels version of art. She concedes the obvious distinctions - length, character, vocabulary - not as a retreat but as a setup. The pivot is “but”: difference doesn’t equal hierarchy. “Each level” reads like a deliberately democratic phrase, a leveling device that treats picture books, middle-grade novels, YA, and adult fiction as distinct ecosystems rather than rungs on a ladder.

The intent is craft-facing, almost tactile. Mahy isn’t talking about themes; she’s talking about “the words one can use and the way one uses them,” the granular pleasures of diction and rhythm. That’s a children’s author’s manifesto disguised as mild-mannered common sense: constraints are not merely limits, they are instruments. A smaller vocabulary isn’t a smaller imagination; it’s an invitation to precision, musicality, and surprise. Shorter length isn’t thinner meaning; it forces architecture, compression, the strategic placement of wonder.

The subtext also reads like a defense of audience respect. Writing “down” is a category error; what changes across levels is not the writer’s seriousness but the contract with the reader - what you can assume, what you must earn, how quickly you must enchant. In context, Mahy’s career sits inside decades of debates about children’s literature being “less than.” Her answer is slyly confident: the pleasure is in mastery, and mastery looks different depending on who you’re writing for.