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.

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.

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.

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.

we've learned an interesting rule about fame. Those who seem desperate for it are the people that others least want to see.

Sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst.

I've become a body of films, not a man, I am all those films.

Someday a loving Hand will be laid upon our shoulder and this brief message will be given: "Come home.

Laws die, books never.

I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.

Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?

Not a single person whose name is worth remembering lived a life of ease.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

There is no better exercise than to study and devour a picture, and then, without looking at it again, to attempt the next day to reproduce it.