Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.

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 end toward which all human acts are directed is happiness.

Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring Godly values is the most progressive course of action that we could ever hope to take.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.

We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do.

Me and Bianca [Stewart] would go to thrift stores like the Salvation Army. We'd pick up dope stuff no one ever heard of. But we'd put it together in ways that would work and be different.

To let a fool kiss you is bad...To let a kiss fool you is worse. 'Twas not my lips you kissed but my soul.

I want industrial design to be a public subject. I want people to love objects the way they love clothing.

It's been an extraordinary journey. I have learned so much along the way. I entered the modeling industry as a business person already. I always knew I belonged on the other side of the camera.

A lot of people misunderstand me. That's because they don't know me at all.