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When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.

Margaret Mahy

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Margaret Mahy
Age: 76 †
Born: 1936
Born: March 21
Died: 2012
Died: July 23
Author
Librarian
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Whakatane
Mahy
Margaret May
Shared
Written
Reading
Someone
Ideas
Done
Corrected
Work
Improved
Behalf

More quotes by Margaret Mahy

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At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.
Margaret Mahy
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There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and live with the characters.
Margaret Mahy
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a man who builds a house never really dies.
Margaret Mahy
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It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books.
Margaret Mahy
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I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.
Margaret Mahy
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Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language.
Margaret Mahy
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I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.
Margaret Mahy
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Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.
Margaret Mahy
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I am really chained to my computer these days so I work in my bedroom, which is a room I have worked in for years and years. It is just as much an office as a bedroom, and during the day, my bed is rather like an extension of my desk.
Margaret Mahy
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I don't think I prefer writing for one age group above another. I am just as pleased with a story which I feel works well for very small children as I do with a story for young adults.
Margaret Mahy
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In a way, the characters often do take over.
Margaret Mahy
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I've never actually been a fighter myself - fighting tires me out and I'm not an efficient fighter anyway - but I have certainly seen other people have great complicated goes at one another.
Margaret Mahy
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Time was too much a part of love, for even in fairytales the proof of love was not its first moment, but its latest ones - that people lived happily ever after. Love at first sight was nothing but infatuation until proved by time.
Margaret Mahy
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If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing twice.
Margaret Mahy
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Canadians are Americans with no Disneyland.
Margaret Mahy
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When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss.
Margaret Mahy
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Do you think that clothes have a life of their own, and maybe have unsuitable affairs with opposite styles? I mean - you look at some people - their clothes go on flirting long after the people inside them have lost interest.
Margaret Mahy
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People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.
Margaret Mahy
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Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.
Margaret Mahy
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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