Quotes from Rick Yancey

One of the joys of a really good book is that you're so into the world of the book, you forget what you're looking at is words on a page.

I got a very late start at fatherhood. I'm a late bloomer in general. It took me seven years to get through four years of college. I was five years away from 40 before I had a family, and I had never been around kids much at all. All of a sudden, I was around three boys all the time.

The doctor frowned upon drinking and often expressed wonderment at men who willingly made imbeciles of themselves.

Good God, man, what is that smell?" He eyed with disgust the doctor's filthy cloak. "Life," answered the doctor.

A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails.

Just because a man is a homicidal maniac doesn't make him wrong.

To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me.

When I wake up the next morning, there's a Hershey's Kiss sitting on the table beside me.

I don't move. I wait behind my log, terrified. Over the past ten minutes, it's become such a dear friend, I consider naming it: Howard, my pet log.

God doesn't call the equipped, son. God equips the called. And you have been called.

Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.

You can only call someone crazy if there's someone else who's normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.

Adolphus is not at his desk. That means he is somewhere in the Monstrumarium, has gone home for the day, or is dead.

You can't band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.

We have survived the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will ever fight, the Earth's final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance.

How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive things.

Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, 'The 5th Wave,' explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us.

'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?

I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me.

The aliens of 'The 5th Wave' are not the aliens we've imagined. Not the aliens we'd like to attack us.

With an enemy like that, who needs friends?

Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves, as a matter of fact.

Sometimes in my tent, last at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping, against the sky.