Quotes from Leigh Bardugo

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.

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

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.'

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'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.'

Most of the female characters I admire come from science fiction and fantasy, maybe because there's more permission to shake up gender roles in genre.

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.

Certainly, I had a wonderful push from my publisher and got very lucky. I'm very aware of what it means to have a publisher back you. But your job as a writer, no matter what else is happening, is to continue to produce work-whether you're succeeding or failing.

The stories we tell each other and the stories we tell about heroism, about magic, about faith - those things say a lot about who we are and the kind of lessons that we wanna convey to our children.

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.

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

'Shadow and Bone' was the first. Siege and Storm' was challenge and surprise. Ruin and Rising' was the opportunity to see a story through to its end.

People, particularly big men carrying big rifles, don't expect lip from a scrawny thing like me. They always look a bit dazed when they get it.

We put on our best clothes and die like heroes.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

Here's the thing, we talk about diversity in the media as if it's some weird artificial construct that we're putting onto these narratives. But it isn't. Our world is not homogenous. It is not all straight or white or able-bodied, or if it is, maybe you should make some new friends. That is not what our world looks like.

Teenage girls have so much sway over culture, yet people sneer at the things that women and girls love, and are contemptuous of the creators of that content, particularly if they are women.