Family!... You might just as well celebrate battle, murder and sudden death.

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.

The steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.

She blushed and I smiled when we saw the Magpie look at us while we kissed below the Acacia tree!

Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.

Man can find meaning in life only through devoting himself to society.

They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

Fragrances fill the senses with the mysterious.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

I thought Johnny Depp was so cute when I was younger.

All service is the same with God.