Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.

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.

[I]t wasn't history that was too fragile, but me.

The character was created by you, if you kill yourself you kill the character, it happen because you done it... you don't realise it!

It's not enough to know pain

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion.

The essence of love is kindness.

I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction.

We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it.

We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

I think people enjoy reading about money, but the people who are in charge of giving me guidance tell me not to talk about it in interviews. Why not? That's what everybody thinks about.

I'm a huge fan of process. Even if it's a movie that I don't think is quite as successful, I'm really intrigued by the process of it.