Art & Creativity Quote by Margaret Mahy

"When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books"

Margaret Mahy, Author

About this Quote

Writing, in Margaret Mahy s framing, is a lonely competence disguised as a romantic vocation. The first sentence has that deceptively casual "of course" that writers use to smuggle in a hard truth: nobody is coming to rescue you from the messy parts. Drafting and correcting are not separate jobs you can outsource to the mood, the muse, or the myth of effortless talent. They are the work, and they are yours.

Then she pivots to librarianship, and the comparison quietly sharpens her point. As a librarian, Mahy was expected to be conversant in a whole ecosystem of books. The job carries an institutional mandate: you are a node in a network, paid to be broadly literate, to connect readers to shelves, to keep the culture legible. That expectation is communal and externally enforced. Writing is the inverse: you choose the project, you set the standards, you police your own blind spots. The responsibility is total precisely because the authority is self-appointed.

The subtext is professional humility without self-pity. Mahy is warning against the fantasy that authorship is only inspiration, while also honoring the quiet training librarianship provides: a disciplined omnivorousness, an ear for what different kinds of readers need, a respect for the vastness of the written world. In context, it reads like a practical autobiography of craft: her imagination did not emerge from nowhere; it was sharpened by a career built on attentive reading and wide-ranging curiosity.

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Margaret Mahy

Margaret Mahy (March 21, 1936 - July 23, 2012) was a Author from New Zealand.

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