Time & Perspective Quote by Margaret Mahy

Mahy frames writing less as a job than as a controlled disappearance. The everyday self "retreats" so the story can "take me over" - a phrase that makes inspiration sound slightly invasive, even possessed. That tilt matters. She is defending a state outsiders often misread as laziness, preciousness, or antisocial behavior: the writer who needs to be left alone. By casting ordinary life as something that can step back, Mahy suggests the creative act isn’t built on constant multitasking; it requires a narrowing of attention so intense it becomes a temporary relocation of identity.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the cultural demand that art be produced on command, in the margins of errands and obligations. "Space and time" isn’t romantic ambiance; it’s infrastructure. Mahy is quietly arguing that imagination has a cost, and the cost is presence elsewhere. Her scare quotes around "live" do double duty: they acknowledge the absurdity of claiming to live with fictional people while insisting that, emotionally and ethically, this is still a form of living. Writers rehearse motives, consequences, tenderness, cruelty - all the messy simulations that make characters feel real.

In context, Mahy wrote for children and young adults, genres routinely patronized as breezy or effortless. This is her insistence that the work is immersive, not lightweight. The line also humanizes the writer: not a magician pulling plots from thin air, but a person who needs permission to vanish for a while in order to return with something true.