John Marsden (writer) Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

Live as though you'll die tomorrow, but farm as though you'll live forever.

John Marsden
Don't treat people as you think they are, treat them as you think they are capable of becoming.

John Marsden
If you added up all the really significant episodes in your life they'd probably come to less than sixty minutes.

John Marsden
Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does.

John Marsden
Well, I've learnt this much: it doesn't matter what it costs, it's worth paying the price. You can't live cheap and you can't live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you've paid it, that's what I reckon.

John Marsden
My pen.' Funny, I wrote that without noticing. 'The torch', 'the paper', but 'my pen'. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It's about the most important thing I own.

John Marsden
"we saw this big dark red leech hanging off his back. We were dancing round yelling: 'We'll burn it off! Get the petrol! Stay still Mr Kassar, you can trust us!' He wimped out though, and made us use salt. Very boring.

John Marsden
Let no stranger intrude here, no invader trespass. This was ours, and this we would defend.

John Marsden
The Bible just said 'Thou shalt not kill', then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath.

John Marsden
I didn't confess how wrecked I was. Let them keep thinking I was Superwoman if they wanted. I knew the truth.

John Marsden
It's good to keep changing your mind. It shows you're thinking. I'll only stop changing my mind when I'm dead. And maybe not even then.

John Marsden
There's no room for anything else. You forget that you're tired or cold or hungry. You forget that banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there's such a thing as a future.

John Marsden
We'd thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn't have to walk into a place to invade it.

John Marsden
The only true test of friendship is the time your friend spends on you.

John Marsden
I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.

John Marsden
They say teenagers can sleep all day. I often used to look at dogs and be amazed by the way they seemed to sleep for twenty hours a day. But I envied them too. It was the kind of lifestyle I could relate to.We didn't sleep for twenty hours, but we gave it our best shot.

John Marsden
I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid the immature the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent.

John Marsden
Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.

John Marsden
Name three types of olives." "Olives! I wouldn't know one type!" "Well, there are three. You can get green ones, you can get black ones, or you can get stuffed.

John Marsden
At that age you think boys have as much personality as coat hangers and, you don't notice their looks. Then you grow up.

John Marsden
So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.

John Marsden
When you're scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave.

John Marsden
What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.

John Marsden
Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict's uniform.

John Marsden
People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying 'Housing Commission' or 'private school' or 'church' or 'mosque' or 'synagogue'. They stopped looking once they saw those signs.

John Marsden