Margaret Mahy Quotes

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.

Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.

I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

Sometimes I think my past life was unrealized. I met a tragic end - it might have been a car over a cliff. But it's true, I came from another time and place, and landed in Paris Hilton's backyard.

I just spent a lot of time on 'ER' for that eight years. I also started working when I was 16, so by the time I left 'ER,' I was 40 years old, I had this incredible experience, my wife had this great company, we had four kids, it was like, 'Let's go to New York and live for a while and make that the priority.'

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

I still love hockey. It's just I'm at a different stage of my life and I think I'm just ready to grow in other ways outside of just being a hockey player.

By the time I was 8 years old, sports had pretty much taken over my life.

I've had a great metamorphosis in my life. I struggled for a number of years because I was identified with that image of the Seventies.

I played competitive golf all my life. Then all of a sudden, when I quit playing the game, I've got all this spare time and this energy. And certainly I wasn't ready to pack up my bags and go sit in front of the television with a shawl on.

When I was thirty, and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it's just the opposite.

My life has changed. I'm not walking around any more wishing I wasn't me, which was the case at one time.

I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another.

I feel ghostly unreal until I become somebody else again on the screen.

By the time I went to Yale, I'd been acting for a long time and I was really tired of it. I was restless - and a little bored - and I was really eager to investigate different parts of myself.

I think, for a long time, people just did not know what to do with me. I looked like a Barbie doll, and then I had this voice like I spend my life in a bar, and I said things that were alarming and had ideas that didn't make sense.

Adapting to our Second Adulthood is not all about the money. It requires thinking about how to find a new locus of identity or how to adjust to a spouse who stops working and who may loll, enjoying coffee and reading the paper online while you're still commuting.

I don't even know who that person was in the '80s. I see pictures of myself from back then and I don't even recognize myself.

I've always been an outsider; a displaced person.

I first got into fruit when I was a teenager, when my life was changing in every way. The first time I had a mango, at like 18, I was like, 'Where has this been my whole life?'

I think I went through my phase of feeling sort of invisible when I left my small hometown in Canada and moved to the big city of Vancouver. I kind of had to decide right there in that moment what I was going to do with the rest of my life and make a thousand decisions after finishing high school. Fortunately, I chose acting.

Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they're 25, I felt I no longer had an identity.

I've worked for a long time, but I got to the point where I felt like, I am out here so far, how do I get back? I want to have a real life, a personal life. I didn't want a personal life I just visited.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

I always felt like I was born in the wrong time period. I felt like I should've been born in the mid-to-late '40s.