Top 30 Kameron Hurley Quotes

Authors make stuff up. Let’s not pretend it’s any more magical than that.

Writers of all things speculative have played in alternate and parallel worlds for a long time – everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee – and it’s an obsession that likely isn’t going away any time soon.

I want to be constantly in awe of the possibilities of the universe.

This is the biggest trick of the sort of thing I write: creating fun, powerful stories with tons of interesting stuff going socially and culturally that doesn’t overly confuse the reader.

As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I used to love writing bleak, grimdark futures full of bleak, grimdark people. But I’ve found that as the world around me darkens, all I really want to do is grasp for more light.

When we see sexist and racist behavior, the only way to change that is also to point it out and make it clear that it’s not okay.

Once readers and industry professionals have you pegged down as writing a particular type of book, they are less likely to try something new from you if they decided they didn’t like the first one.

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of ‘Twilight Zone.’ My mother was obsessed with the show, as it was a staple of her childhood – and thus she made it one of ours, too.

Know that you’re gonna screw up, and be OK with it, and do better next time.

I think that there’s this idea – especially for male readers, but female readers as well, because we’re all indoctrinated, right? – where there’s this idea that if a woman is tough, it can only be in a way that is still sexy.

If your entire conception of what’s possible in fantasy only comes from other fantasy books, you’re going to go on to create a copy of a copy of a copy. There’s nothing original there, nothing dynamic. Which is fine if that’s your goal, but I’ve always wanted to do something no one else was doing before.

The reality is that much of the stuff you see in film, television, comics, and children’s cartoons got its start inside the inspired, disruptive halls of science-fiction and fantasy literature.

I’m terribly particular about what I read: lush writing, secondary world or seriously far-out science fiction, strong worldbuilding, dynamic characters. I need to have it all for it to work for me.

I’m the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.

Being a writer, writing for a living, is one long persistence game. Everyone wants you to quit. Quite often, you want to quit. You get kicked down. You come up swinging. You keep going. Either you are committed to it, or you aren’t.

Pen names have always fascinated me, in part because I understand the professional and economic and even societal reasons to do so.

I know a lot of writers who tell me they ‘always’ knew how to read. They can’t remember a time before reading. And those writers make me want to tear my hair out.

One of the things I stress to those I meet, especially young people, is that we are the heroes of our own lives, and we can be the masters of our own stories.

I think anger of any kind is valuable. It’s all about learning how to channel it. The worst thing we can do is get bored or complacent or worse – suppress our anger and then see it burst forth in unhealthy ways.

Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.

I tried to be really nice and like the things other people liked and do the things other people were supposed to do, and what you find out is that they’re going to bully you anyway. And I thought, ‘You know what? If I’m going to get bullied anyway, I might as well get bullied for making a difference in the world.’

I want to write books that keep people up at night, where they cry through the first forty pages and keep reading anyway.

I don’t like to write about things that bore me, and that means I steer far clear of writing books that are just like what’s on the shelves.

I’m a naturally lazy person, and I live for a challenge.

I started writing books because I couldn’t find the books I wanted to read on the shelf.

As for the best ’80s action movie, I’m going to be predictable here and say ‘Die Hard.’ I watch that movie at least twice a year. Perfect script.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

I enjoy challenging myself in new and different ways.

There is no greater threat to progress than the phrase, ‘That’s impossible.’

While many alternate reality stories ask, ‘What might have been?’ parallel universe stories literalize the war between good and evil that plays inside each of us every day. It’s what makes this type of story so perfect for many fantasy tales: we’re all just a coin flip away from being entirely different people.