Quotes from Leigh Bardugo

I think there's tremendous power in the images we associate with Russian culture and history, these extremes of beauty and brutality that lend themselves to fantasy.

I had soaked up all of these ideas about what it meant to be a creative person from media and culture. And I had this idea in my head that if this was your calling it was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to feel good to wrestle with a blank page. And imagine my surprise when it wasn't fun at all.

I'm very fickle when it comes to genre. I read YA, non-fiction, mysteries, romance. I'll read anything that comes with a strong recommendation.

YA fiction tends to have a finite quality. You're looking toward a goal - prom or graduation or revolution - and we leave these characters after a moment of tremendous transformation.

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

I think in YA there's sometimes a temptation to create heroines who are infinitely resilient and wise and confident because those are the behaviors we want to see teens embrace and maybe we want to see those things in ourselves.

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.

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.

I've gotten very used to falling off of things. It's almost like that's my skill! I'm great at falling down and getting back up.

You want a love story too? There's none to be had.

The two genres that probably take the most flack in literature - they are young adult and romance right now. I don't think it's a coincidence that these are genres that provide places for women to express desire and love for adventure, for the opportunity to be placed to heroic roles.

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

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.

Sometimes when we find love we pretend it away, or ignore it, or tell ourselves we're imagining it. Because it's the most painful kind of hope there is. By indifference . By death.

If you were to just slap together Six of Crows' and Shadow and Bone,' it really wouldn't work.

I like to say that I always have a whole book in front of me. I write down the major beats, the major action moments or emotional moments. In theory, that's a book - it's just one page long. Then I start to go back and fill things in.

Netflix was like, 'We want all the books!' So, thank you, Eric Heisserer. But I was really nervous at first. It's one thing to hand over the keys to one trilogy, but it's quite another to hand over the keys to 10 years of work.

After the Grisha Trilogy, I think I was a little burned out on 'chosen one' narratives and I wanted to take a big step away from that.

Even if you are lucky enough to sell a trilogy, you don't know if you'll ever get to write that whole trilogy. I have many friends who had very long arcs planned in multi-book series that they never got to write because the first book didn't perform.

When people write about secret societies, there is a desire to demystify them. I wanted to hyper-mystify them.

You have to remember that Shadow and Bone' was the first book I sold. And it was, in fact, the first book I ever finished writing, despite many attempts before that to finish a novel. And when I was writing it, I didn't know if anybody was going to buy one book, let alone all three.

I didn't publish my book until I was 37. So the ability to pay my bills, pay my rent, make a life for myself, and become a working writer was a puzzle that took me a while to solve.

When I did the zero draft for Six of Crows,' it was a very organic process.

When I was a kid, I was pretty obsessed with 'The Princess and the Pea.' I'm still not sure why. Something about that image of twenty featherbeds and twenty mattresses? It's not a story with a lot of psychological resonance so apparently kid me just wanted a magical trip to Ikea.