Holly Black

“I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks- cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up.He called it his second smile.”

“I am not very good at sticking to outlines, and I double back all the time to revisit scenes and change things.”

“One of my favorite things in books is watching someone make the mistake. You know it's going to happen. You keep thinking: 'Don't do it!' But of course they're going to do it. It's riveting. You learn through them that it's okay. It's the ecstatic fall, where you watch someone make that terrible decision, and there's such pleasure in it.”

“Nothing can happen more beautiful than death - Walt Whitman”

“Faeries are associated with wild untamed nature, with art, and with death - so the folklore is rich with different stories to explore.”

“Magic gives you a lot of choices," Grandad says. "Most of them are bad.”

“The problem with faerie gifts is that they always come with a price, which is why they are made by the desperate and the foolish.”

“Writers usually don't get to pick our own covers. I know it's surprising to hear that.”

“What an author doesn't know could fill a book.”

“I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don't even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I'm going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn't involve dying.”

“Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn't going to.”

“Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying”

“In those stories, one is often asked to do something unimaginably terrible to the creature. Cut off it's head, say. A test. Not a test of love. A test of trust. Trust lifts the spell.”

“I really love being a weirdo who writes a lot of different things for a lot of different ages. I have been considering doing a guide on my website so that a reader who liked one of my books could find the other books that he or she might like, because I know some of the books are really different from the rest.”

“Keep going' she told herself, 'Don't look back.' But she looked anyways.”

“I think there's a reason that horror appeals to teens. There's a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again.”

“I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they’ll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there’s nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars.”

“I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.”

“Be careful," Aidan called from the bed. "You don't know what he might do." "We all know what you'd do, though, don't we?”

“I got bored," he says. "Besides, you know what's creepier than walking around your dead brothers' apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.”