It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.

When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.

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.

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.

I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it?

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications.