Quotes from Leigh Bardugo

I think I'm always interested in the people who aren't generals or master spies or royalty. The people caught in the crossfire.

The people who live lives that are the most dangerous don't usually come in twirling a mustache rubbing their hands menacingly saying 'I'm an evil genius.' They're people who are charismatic, charming and appealing, who speak to some part of us that makes us want to follow them, that makes us attracted to them.

I love the standard fantasy setting of Medieval England and Medieval Europe, but I wanted to go somewhere different.

What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men.

'Ninth House' is my first book for adults.

There were times in the writing of Ninth House' where I thought, have I gone too far?'

I started reading fantasy and science fiction and writing fantasy and science fiction when I was - when I started junior high school.

It wasn't until I picked up Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones and Stephen King that I found there were people who were like me.

I'm hesitant to ascribe too much to luck because I think women have a bad habit of doing that. At the same time, there's no question that I entered the market at the right moment.

I'm not interested in a world without magic.

When you start dictating culture, money gets involved and people take notice.

I don't care if you danced naked on the roof of the Little Palace with him. I love you, Alina, even the part of you that loved him.

Making the New York Times' list is the kind of thing you don't even let yourself imagine because it seems so unlikely, so it was incredible to actually see my name there.

Sturmhond, a privateer from the second book in the series, Siege and Storm,' is probably my favorite character. He's pure confidence and that's always fun to write.

I have degenerative bone disease and I walk with a cane. And when I wrote Six of Crows,' I went out on tour, and I met a lot of readers who would say, 'Oh, I don't know why, but I pictured Kaz as being an old man at first.' And I thought, of course you did, because the only people we see with mobility aids in media and in culture are old.

I think the first trick to writing a feminist work is to write plenty of women. That way you get to write characters, instead of worrying about paradigms.

I like alphas. I like bad boys. I like a guy with a protective streak.

Fantasy is expensive. It's an expensive endeavor. I have to admit, I didn't write with adaptation in mind. So the books simply become more outlandish as they go on, and they're full of a lot of locations and elaborate set pieces.

When I see someone deride things that women and girls find pleasure in, all I see is someone fearful that women will overtake the culture they've had dominion over for so long.

A lot of my favorite books have been adapted horribly.

I had wanted to be a writer for a very long time, but I had no talent for finishing books. I would start them, get about 20,000 words in, and come to a screeching halt, because I had no idea how to outline a story or what my own process as an author was.

I had wanted to be a writer for a very long time, and I had started a lot of books and failed to finish them. I had this terrible pattern of beginning manuscripts and then just losing steam, and I had begun to believe that I just didn't have it in me.

Look, I don't think villains are interesting when you can't tell where they're coming from.

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