Leigh Bardugo

“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.”

“And what god do you serve, then?”“Whichever will grant me good fortune.” “I don’t think gods work that way.” “I don’t think I care.”

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

“Her heart felt too full, a dry creek bed ill-prepared for such rain.”

“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.”

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

“Fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.”

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

“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.”

“The moment our lips met, I knew with pure and piercing certainty that I would have waited for him forever.”

“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.”

“Van Eck raised a brow. "How old are you, girl? Sixteen? Seventeen? Nations rise and fall. Markets are made and unmade. When power shifts, someone always suffers.”

“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.”

“Nina, you taught me to be something better. They could be taught, too.”

“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.'”

“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.”

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

“I was a huge theater nerd when I was younger, so I was in a bunch of school musicals - Working,' South Pacific,' Fiddler on the Roof,' a very weird little operetta called Charlotte Sweet,' Nine,' The Wiz.'”

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

“She rested her head on his shoulder. "You're better than waffles, Matthias Helvar." A small smile curled the Fjerdan's lips. "Let's not say things we don't mean, my love.”