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.

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.

People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.

New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications.

I don't want to die, really. I'm interested in what happens next, so I've got to keep on.

By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.

Will you still love me when I'm a monster?

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.

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.

I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation.

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing twice.

It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else.

When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves

The things that are most worthwhile in life are really those within the reach of almost every normal human being who cares to seek them out.

Traveling around sure gets me down and lonely, nothing else to do but close my mind. I sure hope the road don't come to own me, there's so many dreams I've yet to find. But you're so far away.

I'm not at all embarrassed to be a revolutionary.

We can all reprogram our brain's responses by putting ourselves into new, initially uncomfortable situations. We'll learn fear might not mean 'stop'; I've come to believe fear usually means 'go.

Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.

When your child is sick, you have tunnel vision.

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

Be your own teacher. Let life write your textbook.