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

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.

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.

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

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)

I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.

I don't know that you can do an absurdist film and just have everybody embrace it in terms of filling out cards. I just don't think it happens. So you have to prepare an audience.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

Problems arise when you identify with your thoughts and emotions. Try to be a witness to the thoughts instead of being totally identified with them.

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

Blessedness consists in the accomplishment of our desires, and in our having only regular desires.

Lack of Confidence, low Self-Esteem, and depleted Mojo are symptoms of inadequate Strength Training.