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.

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?

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.

We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.

She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for...

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.

Sometimes if you have financial restraints, it's a benefit. It forces you to come up with a more creative way.

Madonnas got one big choice. Take a couple of years off and become a human being.

Humans were built to look back; that's why we have that swivel joint in our necks

If people like you, they'll give you a hand. But if they trust you, they'll give you their heart. And heart to heart, we can face anything together.