Scott Westerfeld

“When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.”

“Shay sometimes talked in a mysterious way, like she was quoting the lyrics of some band no one else listened to.”

“I've learned a lot about stage-managing for illustration. Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image. I've also learned to making big-scale design decisions early.”

“First love is amazing and wonderful, but a kind of panic underlies it, a sense of not knowing what you're doing.”

“The difference between being a part-time writer and a full-time writer is like the difference between dating someone and living with them. Some of the romance is gone, but you learn things you'd never know just by dating.”

“Ignorance doesn't lead to salvation, nor does knowledge pave the way to sin. - Cinda Williams Chima”

“But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”

“You don't know what it's like, when your best friend disappears.”

“Maybe that was the price of loving someone: you lost your grasp of where they ended and you began.”

“That's the worst thing they do to you, to any of you. Whatever those brain lesions are all about, the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You're all brainwashed into believing you're ugly.”

“But I feel more real when I'm around her. Like I'm not fading.”

“Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.”

“She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods. "Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry.""Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?"Tally glances up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moment's calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way." "A week?""That means seven days.""Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?""Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before. He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world.”

“Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.”

“Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.”

“I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.”

“Some mornings when I wake up, it takes a long time to remember who I am. Like, it takes a while for everything that's happened in last month to download into my brain. It's nice, not knowing. Even if it's just for five minutes.”

“What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.”

“I think any List of Best X creates arguments and people saying 'You listed that rubbish?' That's what lists like this are for.”

“More lies, but maybe lies were better than the truth.”