Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My dad was my hero when I was a young boy. And then it's a toss-up between Han Solo, the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby team, and Marlon Brando.
Astrology's a moving system that depends on where you're looking at it from on Earth. My horoscope here in London would be completely different to down in New Zealand.
I have more engagement with New Zealand than people might think. Unlike the impression I have of the American president, who sits in the Oval Office and people come to them.
There's probably a tendency to view power... to be either based on size or the size and power of your economy. I think New Zealand's strength has always been using our voice on the issues that matter, and we've been consistent on it. There is power in that.
New Zealand was such a weird place in the 1980s. For instance, we used to have this commercial in the late 1970s where this guy drives this car and stops outside a corner store. He goes in to buy something, and when he comes out, his car is gone. He's like, 'Huh?' Then a voice says, 'Don't leave your keys in the car.'
It's fair to say that, for much of my lifetime, New Zealand certainly was a property-owning democracy and working people, ordinary people, had assets.
I'm not going to head off and do a Marvel film. So if I don't do a Marvel film, I don't have any other choice - I've got to go make a small New Zealand movie!
As soon as I got off the plane in L.A., I heard they'd cast the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy and that it was all being shot in New Zealand! That was pretty ironic.
The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.
I want to leave New Zealand in better shape than I found it. I know the job of prime minister is not forever and I'm going to do the best I can every day to make that difference.
Fortunately New Zealand doesn't have land borders so we are able to be somewhat more rigorous on who gets in and out of our country than perhaps some people.
There's a very go-to kind of attitude in New Zealand that stems from that psyche of being quite isolated and not being able to rely on the rest of the world's infrastructure.
I'm quite proud of growing up in New Zealand where, from quite early on in primary school, you're learning to count in Maori, Maori mythology and dances and colours and history, and I think that gives a child a really good grounding.
My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'
New Zealand needs to balance its environmental responsibilities with its economic opportunities, because the risk is that if you don't do that - and you want to lead the world - then you might end up getting unintended consequences.
Well, there have been periods in the past when prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand were at each others' throats publicly and frequently. That's not productive at all.
My dad always told me that the principal reason he chose New Zealand to emigrate to after World War II was the high regard his father had for the Kiwis he encountered at Gallipoli.
I went to a state school in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then straight on to the University of Canterbury. But I worked part-time all the way through high school: first with a paper round, then at a fast-food outlet, a video store and a hardware store.
We are a small, open economy, highly dependent on global flows. It is inevitably a demand that dramatically alters and that is reflected in what we feel here in New Zealand. So there is at its most basic level a limit to what we can do and that is true everywhere.
I think it's inevitable that New Zealand will become a republic and that would reflect the reality that New Zealand is a totally sovereign-independent 21st century nation 12,000 miles from the United Kingdom.
'Bad Taste' was - it was, in many respects, my sort of, my, I guess, my single-minded desire to want to break into the film industry when New Zealand didn't really have a film industry to break into.
There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
I've been round Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and China in the last few months and the message that I've been taking is that New Zealand is building an up market dynamic into a connected economy. And that we are not the old-fashioned, ship mutton kind of product the people associate their export in work.
I don't have an anti-Hollywood feeling. It's just I'm a New Zealander. I was born in New Zealand, and it's where my house is, and my family goes to school there. My interest is to remain in my homeland and make films. I don't really want to relocate myself to other countries in the world to work.
I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild.
Well, we don't think for a moment that either the U.S. or Australia are out to damage the New Zealand economy, but if there were a sustained period in which they had a free-trade agreement and New Zealand didn't have that same arrangement with the States, that could be both trade- and investment-distorting.