"Read lots and find out the stories you like to read - which will be the stories you'd like to write, more often than not. Practice your writing like you would practice and instrument or sport, constantly looking for a better word or description of something."

"I am working on a new story set on an island. A boy has come to the island with his father to look for his sister who has disappeared.... It's in two viewpoints - the other being a native of the island who wants to leave as soon as she's old enough - just like her elder sister. Or did she?"

"I used to worry about not having ideas to work on, but found the less I worried about it and kept my eyes and mind open to things around me - the ideas came all on their own. I love people and thinking about how they tick, why they do things and what happens next!"

"Trouble in Time came about when I was visiting my Poppa with my son who was about 3 at the time. I remembered my Poppa hooning around on his motorbike on his small farm, helping people in his little rural town here in New Zealand and being on the go. My son saw a frail elderly man sitting in his chair in the sunshine. Grandparents have done cool things in their lives - just ask them!q"

"My poem kidnaps children, puts them in state welfare institutions, abuses them and stops them speaking their own language."

"Oh no! Here I go again, with my pen and my exercise book, inciting “hate speech” and “dehumanising” people."

"When I write a poem it turns into a “hate crime” right then and there. It springs up off the page, and marches out into the street like an army of ten thousand colonial soldiers armed with guns."

"Later, my white neighbour will come over to my house and say: Let me explain something to you, Tusiata. “Racism is like a scab on your knee”, and “if you pick it”, what will happen? “Leave it alone and it will heal”, otherwise I fear the “wound will get infected”. And what will happen to me then? Huh? What will happen to me then?"

"Now, I want you to listen closely because I’m going to tell you something very important: Brown women are so privileged now, we can get away with anything. If I was a “white male I would be taken apart!”."

"That’s honestly how simple it is."

"When I write a poem, my “moral compass is marginal” at best and the consequences of my poem “devastate” innocent people all over the country. Look at my poem, causing the “radicalisation of people” and ruining “social cohesion”."

"In the space of a few generations, my poem has traumatised the people who originally owned this land and their language almost disappears."

"It is not complex."

"My poem is no accident. My poem does all these things on purpose. My poem has a plan to take over everyone and everything."

"No colonisation. No genocide. No intergenerational trauma. No two centuries of white privilege."

"The neighbours hear me writing a poem about colonisation and they yell: Stop that “race-baiting”, our kids are trying to sleep."

"Now, I’m howling and ripping off my clothes and writing a poem which is “inciting violence” right through the walls of my house."

"When I am under a full moon, I start writing a poem about colonisation, which is exactly the same as “inciting murder”. Writing a poem is the same as a “manifesto” justifying terrorism and massacre."

"My poem steals my neighbour’s land, and everybody’s land. My poem steals 94 percent of all the land in New Zealand. It steals millions upon millions of acres of land."

"My daughter slumps down outside the bathroom door in tears and whispers: I’m tired of my “acceptable ethnicity”. We brown people have all the privileges now. We can say anything we like and get away with it."

"Sorry guys, the thing is, when I write a poem I become a werewolf."

"There is truly nothing more to think about."

"Damn this poem! It is making my jaw grow long and shaggy, fangs grow from my mouth and my eyes turn red. Here I go, on all fours now, with a tail growing out from under my skirt like a wild dog. Here I go, writing a “racist rant about one of history’s greatest explorers”."

"My daughter locks me in the bathroom and says through the door: Mum, stop that “racist violence dressed up as art”, because, Mum, “poor white people disaffected by the effects of globalism” couldn’t say those things."

"When I write a poem “sexual and racial violence” burst out of me like wolf-fur through the rents in my smooth brown skin. I start howling at the moon and “inciting racial violence” all over the place."

"My views become exactly the same as “those expressed in Germany”. What I mean is, I’m the whole of Nazism and the entire Second World War."

"Mother gathered Three or no more dirty black stones, tossed them to sky that could break what had hardened her ground and without frown or flirt of flower father like grease or butter slipped aside to free her from forty and some more grown men who held."

"“I heard someone explain once why people buy books. They said when people buy a book, they are not just buying that book, they are also visualising that they are buying the time to read it. So when you hold that thing in your hand you are not only anticipating the story between the covers, you are picturing the kind of life that allows space for you to lie about and read. Those unread volumes on your shelves represent a glorious future moment when you will spend time with them"

"I had thought, as many parents do, that ‘one day I am going to sit down and talk to you about this, but right now, we need to get you to dance class, then I have to go to a show or we have to go to school,"

"I get a real charge from ancient Tibetan, Himalayan, and Indian art. I am obsessed by the clouds in Chinese and Tibetan paintings and their representation of strange creatures and mystical worlds . . . Both Eastern and Western references are deposited in the wor"

"I could never be a Minimalist artist: I am interested in corrupting fine art with everything I wish for. I want adventure and to feel the same sense of command that I imagine an explorer or a scientist would––like a visitor trespassing"

"A life that is never tasted when girls is at home are arrested. Gold ties, tighten, play her a fool time, time and time and so it can be imagined chocolate drips from tomato clouds will finally lossen and I will stick, sticky in love with freedom as this."

"And then it turns into, ‘Another day I will talk to you about tattoos or pay equity – I’m sure that day will come.’ But then she was gone."

"origin is no place at all and can only be fabricated out of difference, division designed out of exclusion and extraordinary harm. Country as home is a contemporary concept riddled with empires"

"It resonated with them as they were or had been on the same journey,” You have this idea of what parent-hood is going to look like. Then it comes along and you haven’t even been able to finish a sandwich without someone taking a bite out of it. Being a parent is busy."

"It was kind of strange, really, seeing it all unfold,, who lives in Auckland with husband comedian Jeremy Elwood. “These were a lot of issues that I talk about in my book, the gender pay gap being one of them. And now we’re finally saying, ‘Actually, we know what fair is and this isn’t it."

"I always love having Holly in the audience because I’ve always done stand-up about her. My first stand-up set in 1993 was about giving birth and breastfeeding."

"I don’t know if you’ve met anyone to whom nothing bad has happened. They are the most tedious people in the world."

"I’d like to be a primary school teacher one day, but right now, I am happy being a mum"

"“I want my children to be happy. I want them to find their own purpose in life rather than fall into a life that’s already set up for them"

"My grandmother, my mother, and me, each one of us progressed into our own work, “I take a great deal of pride in being different from my family. Yet I know my mother would absolutely love my work. As a woman, I think she’d be very proud that I’ve chosen to do things in my own style.”"

"I don’t like to feel like I have to stay within a certain style. I like to see things progress and turn into other things. I’m all about adventure."

"I had this internal need to be a healer. My mom was ill a lot when I was a kid. When she got cancer, I became interested in the progression of the disease and how she was being treated,"

"I’m in a position where I don’t have to be labeled… I don’t have to call myself an Indian artist to sell my work, and I decided that it was more to my advantage not to label myself as a particular kind of artist, based solely on my genealogy… now I know that I can be part of something, part of that lineage, without being defined by it."

"I liked the way they looked. They were easy to work with my hands. The drawings turned into these magical things."

"I was first introduced to art cars in the early 90’s in Bisbee by my friend Kate Pearson. She had just seen Harrod Blank’s film “Wild Wheels” and had met Harrod. She got inspired and made her own and I soon followed. My first car was called “The Funk Ambulance,” which was an Oldsmobile 98 painted with lions, a big sound system, and disco lights."