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Quotes by New-zealander Authors
"With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work."
9
"Repetition on things like that becomes quite painful. If you do a stunt sometimes it can look like a stunt."
8
"Spanish alone was understood or spoken here; our friend, the countryman, stuck to us most nobly, he understood us not a bit better than the rest but saw that we were in distress and would not desert us."
8
"It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep."
7
"It's a great challenge to come from little New Zealand and beat the odds in Hollywood."
7
"I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been."
7
"It's definitely going to be harder than it sounds to acquire millions of users in the U.S. It's going to be a lot of work, and you can't make light of that."
7
"I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down."
7
"When I'm alone at home, I really prefer to listen to Wagner's orchestral music rather than any vocal music. I find it illuminating not to have to pay attention to voices in the recordings."
6
"I'm a writer first and a woman after."
6
"If we are genuinely committed to promoting a culture of peace, as individuals we must look to our values and ensure that we all exhibit a peace loving life to our nation's children."
6
"Hollow commitments to action in the future are insufficient. Deferring difficult issues must not be tolerated. Our children and grandchildren expect us to speak and act decisively."
6
"The sexual deviance - I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss that; but we do have hints of it but in a more psychological way and therefore more human way, arguably. Or certainly to the extent that the animated series takes that sexuality."
6
"It's a non-stop invention, this game of life, and as soon as you think you've got it, you lose it."
6
"I'll need every ounce that I have to drive it through. Film and TV require that energy. Sometimes fight scenes can be pretty intense. When I was shooting "Heaven" it was truly guerrilla film-making."
6
"I think we have a fascinating new and quite dominant input into politics - and it wont go away. From time to time, people articulate a view that we should ban opinion polls, but that's nonsense."
6
"I remarked constantly, just at sunset, in these latitudes, that the eastern horizon was brilliantly illuminated with a kind of mock sunset. This in a short time disappeared, to be soon succeeded by another similar in character, but more faint."
6
"Well in the end the world can crank itself up to sanctions, as it has with Zimbabwe, another sad case."
6
"Peace is a fragile thing. It takes courage to secure it. It takes wisdom to maintain it."
5
"The decision by France to resume nuclear testing in the South Pacific has destroyed this hope and raised a storm of protest at home, in the South Pacific and thankfully around the world."
5
"The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity."
5
"The U.S. is by far the biggest exporter of arms in the world. It was true during the Clinton administration, and it's true during the Bush administration. It's bipartisan."
5
"Running became boring because it's so predictable. I got to a point where I knew what my competition could do."
5
"Don't play for safety - it's the most dangerous thing in the world."
5
"Towards the end of 2003 it was hard to get through training - and the darkest point was when a doctor told me there was a possibility I could end up in a wheelchair."
5
"Because I've been on the receiving end of infidelity, I know how much it hurts."
5
"I mention this fact as tending to support what I have often heard stated, namely, that a shark's sense of smell is so keen that, if men ever bathe in seas where they are found, a shark is almost sure to appear directly afterwards."
4
"Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act."
4
"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."
4
"It costs $30,000 to $50,000 per year to send someone to jail. You don't have to pay so much to send someone to school at Johns Hopkins."
4
"I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing."
4
"When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British."
4
"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."
4
"All the principal people in the town are concerned in the slave trade, and their chief wealth consists in the number of slaves they possess; therefore there is little chance of the trade being, for many years, totally abolished."
4
"The Way is not a religion: Christianity is the end of religion. 'Religion' means here the division between sacred and secular concerns, other-worldliness, man's reaching toward God in a way which projects his own thoughts."
4
"I only have so much energy, so something had to go. This is why, at the end of the day, I've preserved my sanity for the children and also manage to do my best at work."
4
"Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with."
4
"People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things."
4
"Every writer has to find their own way into writing."
4
"Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments."
4
"Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be."
3
"The key factor is whether the agent is a member of the Association of Authors' Representatives, which screens its members and requires them to uphold a Canon of Ethics."
3
"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."
3
"I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original."
3
"I am my own Universe, I my own Professor."
3
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