Top 55 Leigh Bardugo Quotes

I think I’m always interested in the people who aren’t generals or master spies or royalty. The people caught in the crossfire.

My relationship with Twitter has evolved as my career has changed. The truth is unless you have a remarkably thick skin, as a creator, it’s a very difficult place to be.

Third books are a scary thing. They come with the weight of so much expectation, and I’ve been keenly aware of that.

I started reading fantasy and science fiction and writing fantasy and science fiction when I was – when I started junior high school.

Let women write horror. Let women write darkness, let women write trauma, without having to carve out their own trauma to justify it.

I cannot shapeshift into an animal. But I can shapeshift into a drunker person.

It was important to me that my heroes not be all good and my villains not be all bad.

I think – I hope – I became a better writer as I’ve worked.

When I was writing Shadow and Bone,’ I really had no confidence as a writer. I had never finished a book before and I desperately wanted to finish a book for the first time.

I want to be really clear about something: I think we kind of fetishize the creative life. We have the vision of what it means to be an author, where you sit in your garret or looking out at your view and you give everything to your art and you commit fully to it. But the reality is that most of us have bills to pay.

And I desperately needed books that would take me out of my environment and show me a world where being smart and brave and prepared was more important than being cute or cheerful or knowing the right thing to say. And that’s what science fiction and fantasy gave me.

I think in YA there’s sometimes a temptation to create heroines who are infinitely resilient and wise and confident because those are the behaviors we want to see teens embrace and maybe we want to see those things in ourselves.

I write very much from what I want to see, and the hardest projects are projects where you lose track of that.

I’d like to say I’d be a Heartrender. I’m quite bloodthirsty and I look great in red.

In our lives, we will all have a moment where we have to learn to hustle.

Let go of the idea that somehow you can outsmart a first draft. Because I have never met anybody who can.

Well, the thing that I realized – I had this very happy, rosy memory of Yale. And I had even described it in the past as my Hogwarts.

If Connecticut is haunted then New Haven is the weirdest of the towns that is haunted.

I am keenly aware of how many people the Six of Crows stories’ brought into the Grishaverse, and to me, the story of the Crows, of Kaz and his crew, provides a very different kind of story and point of view, than Shadow and Bone’ and Alina’s story.

There’s so much power in the idea of becoming monstrous. I think we see that in the way some women and girls choose to adorn themselves now. They don’t care about being pretty or palatable. They paint their lips black, dye their hair green, file their nails into claws.

I had soaked up all of these ideas about what it meant to be a creative person from media and culture. And I had this idea in my head that if this was your calling it was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to feel good to wrestle with a blank page. And imagine my surprise when it wasn’t fun at all.

YA readers are just not rigid about genre. They’re all for the mash-up.

Fantasy novels give this illusion that the stakes are as high as they feel when you’re a teenager. But I think for teenagers they actually are that high. I think you really are dealing in a world of tremendous cruelty and intensity, and YA gives truth to that.

It is a challenge to write in the real world once you’ve had the advantage of being able to create your own world.

At least when I was a kid and a reader, I loved the feeling of wondering whether or not something was real, being able to look up connections.

I didn’t publish my book until I was 37. So the ability to pay my bills, pay my rent, make a life for myself, and become a working writer was a puzzle that took me a while to solve.

Making the New York Times’ list is the kind of thing you don’t even let yourself imagine because it seems so unlikely, so it was incredible to actually see my name there.

If you were to just slap together Six of Crows’ and Shadow and Bone,’ it really wouldn’t work.

There’s been so much hunger for dystopian in the YA world, I really wasn’t sure how Shadow and Bone’ would be received.

When people write about secret societies, there is a desire to demystify them. I wanted to hyper-mystify them.

When you start dictating culture, money gets involved and people take notice.

When I see someone deride things that women and girls find pleasure in, all I see is someone fearful that women will overtake the culture they’ve had dominion over for so long.

The people who live lives that are the most dangerous don’t usually come in twirling a mustache rubbing their hands menacingly saying ‘I’m an evil genius.’ They’re people who are charismatic, charming and appealing, who speak to some part of us that makes us want to follow them, that makes us attracted to them.

I am so clumsy! Like I fall off of bicycles.

I was in Wolf’s Head, one of the ancient eight.

I was one of those kids who looks really good on paper, I tested very well, I went to a fancy college, won some prizes. When I came out of school, I had many horrible jobs, but I didn’t know what the path was to a creative life or the life of a writer.

I think Ruin and Rising’ is the best written of the three and the most structurally sound, but each book means something different to me.

Reading, like writing, was a survival strategy when I was young because these were ways of feeling that my world could be much larger than it actually was. It was inevitable that I would end up writing sci-fi or fantasy.

I’m hesitant to ascribe too much to luck because I think women have a bad habit of doing that. At the same time, there’s no question that I entered the market at the right moment.

And I’m a huge George R. R. Martin fan.

Things that are dark and close to the other side are what bring me joy.

I’m pretty sure Magic Mike’ is the best funded gender studies thesis ever so I’m going to have to see that.

You have to remember that Shadow and Bone’ was the first book I sold. And it was, in fact, the first book I ever finished writing, despite many attempts before that to finish a novel. And when I was writing it, I didn’t know if anybody was going to buy one book, let alone all three.

Books are in a constant battle for attention in a very crowded media scape.

If you’re a particular kind of kid who hasn’t found your tribe, which most of us don’t until later, that’s what books become.

My great heartbreak was completely botching my callback for Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar’ in college.

To me, beauty is a commodity and that’s the way it’s treated in my books. It has power, and though that power is limited, some characters understand that better than others.

I don’t like writing grand battles and I find it tiresome to research weapons development and military strategy.

I was 35 when I started writing Shadow and Bone,’ and my only goal was to finish a book because I had never managed to do it.

When I did the zero draft for Six of Crows,’ it was a very organic process.

Power in superhero stories and in magic, when people use it, it drains them. It makes them more tired or it drains them. I wanted power to feed the people that used it. I wanted it to make the people who used it stronger, more powerful, and beautiful. That was one of the tents of being a Grisha.

It’s all well and good to turn in a beautiful poetic phrase that ends up on a pillow but I want there to be a visceral response to what I write.

In Shadow and Bone,’ Alina’s race is never specified. But that entire book is basically built on a white default. My life has never been entirely white or entirely straight, so I had to really step back and question why I’d chosen to write my first novel that way.

If you have an idea, pursue it.

I’m always the kid who is going to be finding out if there is a cemetery or an abandoned amusement park that I can go visit as opposed to the beach, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to get me to the world of Ninth House.’