Margaret Mahy Quotes

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

Over the years, a number of people have asked me why I tend to write at this great length. I've put some thought into the answer, and it can be boiled down one word: consequences. Well, maybe two words: consequences and characters. Or perhaps, consequences, characters, and the subconscious mind - above all the subconscious mind.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

My first, 'Room on the Roof,' was the longest book I've written.