Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Leigh Bardugo

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Israeli author Leigh Bardugo.

Last updated on December 23, 2024.

Leigh Bardugo is an Israeli-American fantasy author. She is best known for her young adult Grishaverse novels, which include the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, and the King of Scars series. She also received acclaim for her paranormal fantasy adult debut, Ninth House. The Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows series have been adapted into Shadow and Bone by Netflix and Ninth House will be adapted by Amazon Studios; Bardugo is an executive producer on both works.

Israeli - Author

Source: Wikipedia

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

Leigh Bardugo

If you have an idea, pursue it.

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

I was in Wolf's Head, one of the ancient eight.

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.

Leigh Bardugo

Every time you see someone saying a character's too this or too that, those are the things that make a character.

Leigh Bardugo

I'm pretty sure Magic Mike' is the best funded gender studies thesis ever so I'm going to have to see that.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

I think heroines would be pretty boring if they were perfect all the time.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

'Shadow and Bone' is a fantasy set in a country inspired by Tsarist Russia that has been literally torn apart by a swathe of nearly impenetrable darkness.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

Things that are dark and close to the other side are what bring me joy.

Leigh Bardugo

Ravka has a very particular identity among the countries of the Grishaverse. It's surrounded by enemies. It has spent hundreds of years in near isolation because of the Shadow Fold. It is very much a garrison state so there's a tremendous desire to survive, but there's also a kind of soul-deep shrug that goes along with Ravkans knowing the odds.

Leigh Bardugo

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.'

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

And I desperately needed books that would take me out of my environment and show me a world where being smart and brave and prepared was more important than being cute or cheerful or knowing the right thing to say. And that's what science fiction and fantasy gave me.

Leigh Bardugo

It is a challenge to write in the real world once you've had the advantage of being able to create your own world.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

I'd like to say I'd be a Heartrender. I'm quite bloodthirsty and I look great in red.

Leigh Bardugo

And I'm a huge George R. R. Martin fan.

Leigh Bardugo

Let go of the idea that somehow you can outsmart a first draft. Because I have never met anybody who can.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

I don't like writing grand battles and I find it tiresome to research weapons development and military strategy.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

'Ninth House' is my first book for adults.

Leigh Bardugo

My relationship with Twitter has evolved as my career has changed. The truth is unless you have a remarkably thick skin, as a creator, it's a very difficult place to be.

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

I mean, I am an easy crier.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

Joe Trapanese did our score, and when he was first brought on to the project, he and I met up at a coffee shop. I remember just being like, 'I have many files for you.' So we sat there and just exchanged our favorite tracks like the nerds that we are. I subjected him to me singing a Ravkan folk song that is actually in Rule of Wolves.'

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

I am keenly aware of how many people the Six of Crows stories' brought into the Grishaverse, and to me, the story of the Crows, of Kaz and his crew, provides a very different kind of story and point of view, than Shadow and Bone' and Alina's story.

Leigh Bardugo

There's been so much hunger for dystopian in the YA world, I really wasn't sure how Shadow and Bone' would be received.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

I'm not interested in a world without magic.

Leigh Bardugo

When I created the Grisha, it was important that they be powerful but that they kind of represent the Jewish brain trust that developed before World War II and after World War II in the U.S.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

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.

Leigh Bardugo

At least when I was a kid and a reader, I loved the feeling of wondering whether or not something was real, being able to look up connections.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

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.

Leigh Bardugo

I don't believe that a page-by-page adaptation is necessary or interesting.

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo

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

Leigh Bardugo