Margaret Mahy Quotes

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

I have a small vocabulary, which I move around fast.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

I spend a lot of my time just looking at words and grammar and writing things down that I don't know.

Find something you like, go into a room, close the door and read it aloud. Read it aloud. Everybody in the world who likes dance can see dance, or hear music, or see art, or admire architecture - but everybody in the world uses words who is not a recluse or mute. But the writer has to take these most common things, more common than musical notes or dance positions, a writer has to take some adverbs, and verbs and nouns and ball them up together and make them bounce.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

The thing that's depressing is teaching graduate students today and discovering that they don't know simple elemental facts of grammar. They really do not know how to scan a line; they've never been taught to scan a line. Many of them don't know the difference between 'lie' and 'lay,' let alone 'its' and 'it's.' And they're in graduate school!

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

So I think I sometimes will put a cliche in and then just pad it out so you're not noticing.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.