Sabaa Tahir

“I was 5 when I got the speech about how I would have to work harder and longer than everyone else because I was brown.”

“When I was a kid, I worked as a clerk at my parent's motel. From when I was eight or nine, I rented rooms, helped with laundry, folding tons of towels. And then I also worked at my dad's gas station more as a young adult and as an adult.”

“When you write your first book, you're writing in a vacuum; it doesn't matter how much time it takes. And then with the second book, you're on contract, and you have deadlines, and it's a little bit tougher. And also the expectations. You don't want to let your characters down.”

“If I refused to get married, my parents would be brokenhearted and confused. Like any child close to her parents, I could not watch them suffer.”

“I think that YA stories have a lot of heart, and I think that whatever age we are, we connect to them because we sort of see ourselves in them.”

“I grew up feeling voiceless and powerless as a kid. I turned to books - fantasy books in particular - to give me comfort. As I grew up, I realized I could find that sense of power and voice if I simply started writing.”

“You pour your soul into your book, but you never know how it will be received, and when people like your baby, it's a great feeling.”

“When did you star here?” I ask her.“Three days ago. Sir. Aspirant. Um—” She wrings her hands.“Veturius is fine.”She walks carefully, gingerly—the Commandant must have whipped her recently. And yet she doesn't hunch or shuffle like the others slaves. The straight-backed grace with which she moves tells her story better than words. She'd been a freewoman before this—I'd bet my scims on it. And she has no idea how pretty she is—or what kind of problems her beauty will cause for her at a place like Blackcliff. The wind pulls at her hair again, and I catch her scent—like fruit and sugar. “Can I give you some advi”

“Failure doesn't define you. It's what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.”

“As a kid living in an isolated desert town, the most diversity I saw in my media was Claudia Kishi, the Japanese American girl from 'The Baby-Sitters Club.'”

“My mother and father were born and raised in Pakistan, where religion is entrenched in the culture and the culture is explicitly unyielding.”

“Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.”

“I've loved mountains since I was a girl, and when I discovered mountaineering fiction after college, I was hooked.”

“Evil comes in many forms, and whether you are male or female, that doesn't matter as much as what lurks in your mind.”

“Even as a little kid, I told lots of stories, and I wrote them down, and I loved reading fiction and fantasy.”

“Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.”

“I never feared the night, not even as a child, but Blackcliff’s night is different, heavy with a silence that makes you look over your shoulder, a silence that feels like a living thing.”

“As a teenager, I felt so hemmed in and trapped, both by the place I lived and the expectations others had about school, college, and a future career.”

“When I asked myself what I'd want to see in a comic about a Pakistani superhero, the first word that came to mind was 'relatable.'”

“Exhaustion is temporary. Pain is temporary. But Helene dying because I didn't find a way to get her back on time—that's permanent.”