"...I wouldnt really be interested in writing a biography about someone who was obvious and straightforward. Its the enigma of a particular personality, I think, that drives your interest as a biographer. With someone like [John] Mulgan, someone like [Ralph] Hotere, there is a core there which is truly enigmatic, and which obviously fuels the work."
Noeline Edith "Bub" Bridger was a New Zealand poet and short story writer and actor, who often performed her own work and drew inspiration from her Maaori, Irish and English ancestry
"For me, the idea that people in the past can be present, is not a very strange idea when youve had a lot of experience with people that feel that way. Being with [knowing] elders like Eruera Stirling for 20 odd years . . . he looked at the ancestors as if they were just in the next room."
"The place is the context of the poetry. Its not that I write about the place, but the poetry comes out of my life in the place. So in that way it is tremendously important To me, and Im sure i wouldnt be writing what Im writing if I werent in Bluff."
"The mind of a child is a very different thing, and getting into that mind and just seeing the way the mind works...my younger daughter says you know if you stand on your head, you dont blink. Now I dont know if thats true or not, but what a great line and Im going to use that in a book that Im writing at the moment..."
"...all those other How To books were just about people that knew about this thing. This is different, because hes not a bird-watcher; this is his journey into that world . . . Id like it hardbacked and leather, because its a lovely book. Its one youd want to treasure."
"Hers was the first voice like hers that I had discovered in literature before. I was good at English . . . I had never come across a voice like hers before. She was a black woman from the States, and she just blew my mind..."
"Oh its terrifying, yeah: you come up to publication day and you suddenly realise right thats it, its out in the world. I remember when my publishers were telling me that it was starting to get on the bestseller list, and I was thinking Okay, well Ive got a lot of family and a lot of friends, so okay that accounts for the first week. And then I started realising that absolute strangers were gonna be reading it and...yeah it is quite terrifying actually."