I was in New Zealand and met this girl. Her sister dared me to bungee jump, so I did! It was a spur-of-the-moment decision - I wanted to impress the girl, and it worked! We were in a relationship after that.
New Zealand has better food - sorry, America.
The Government has to stop borrowing as much money; if we don't, quite frankly New Zealand will be downgraded and interest rates will go up for all New Zealanders.
I was born in New Zealand, so I have a lot of family there.
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!
People in New Zealand go out of their way to not be impressed by things.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand have apologised for their treatment of native peoples.
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.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough interesting acting roles in New Zealand to sustain a career.
I come from a country that lives and breathes rugby, and I didn't think there would be anywhere else in the world that could be the same. But New Zealand takes it to another dimension. It's extraordinary how much passion Kiwis have for the game.
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.
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.
People were nicer to me when I was in the arts. I experienced extreme racism in small-town New Zealand. Racism which really went away when I got into the arts.
I moved to New Zealand from Winnipeg when I was almost five. I hated it. It was to a city in the south of New Zealand called Invercargill and there was constant rain. There was a depressing sensation in the air.
There's not much of a follow-your-dreams kind of vibe in New Zealand or my family.
As I flew back from New Zealand to bury my mother, it occurred to me that no matter how harrowing her loss was and how keenly it will always be felt, there was, nevertheless, a sense of relief that my father, sisters and I could say a final goodbye after the longest goodbye and relief that my mum had finally been released.
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.
'Heavenly Creatures' was really the idea of Fran Walsh. It was a very famous New Zealand murder case, but not one that people knew much about.
In the early 1980s, the government of New Zealand fell into the hands of true believers, globalist believers, and they embraced the theory of inevitability perhaps more completely than anybody else. And it solved in the very short term some of their debt problems, but in the medium- and long-term, it left them in real economic trouble.
There are parts of New Zealand that I absolutely fell in love with that I will miss going back to, but I kind of think that is the part that can continue and will continue on. I don't imagine I'll stop going back to New Zealand, because I feel part of the fabric there, really.
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.
I really want to see New Zealand; it's a beautiful place.
I have a memory of this experience when I was young, watching 'Stop Making Sense,' the Talking Heads concert movie, which is one of the best concert movies ever, and I saw it in a full house in New Zealand, and everyone was cheering between songs, and you really felt like you were part of the audience at the gig.
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.
The best sheep breeders are in Australia and New Zealand.
I always think about the settlers who moved to New Zealand in the 1800s. They hadn't even been to the place before. They just packed their bags and shipped over knowing they'd never see their family again or be able to speak to them - they'd maybe get a letter if they were lucky.
New Zealand as a whole needs to save more, spend less and reduce our reliance on foreign debt.
Everybody knows about Peter Jackson, 'The Hobbit' movies and 'The Lord of the Rings' films being made in New Zealand, and to actually have been part of it for such a long period, to live there and to have friends that I will have for life because of that experience, is an amazing thing.
