Top 224 Quotes & Sayings by Scott Westerfeld

The difference between being a part-time writer and a full-time writer is like the difference between dating someone and living with them. Some of the romance is gone, but you learn things you'd never know just by dating.

When the term 'machine gun' enters common parlance, the word 'machine' becomes much more sinister.

Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.

Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image.

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college.

Warning stickers on books would be a nightmare.

I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.

I think any List of Best X creates arguments and people saying 'You listed that rubbish?' That's what lists like this are for.

I have no problem with commenters stating strong opinions, except for my usual annoyance with people who don't agree with me.

I've learned a lot about stage-managing for illustration. Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image. I've also learned to making big-scale design decisions early.

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college. However, my adult books are all science fiction, which has some similarities to YA.

Luckily for writers - and unluckily for history - every scientific idea creates human conflict.

I wouldn't say design has become strictly functional. A lot of cars these days look downright comic book to me, and the info-gadgets with which late industrial people spend the most time - phones, music players, etc. - are blobjects.

When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.

I moved to New York when I was 21 or 22 as a graduate fellow.

Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.

So, there was this beautiful princess. She was locked in a high tower(...)She was stuck up there(...)So the only thing was to jump.

The lie took form as she spoke, pulling on as many strands of truth as it could reach.

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.

It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.

She looked at David closely, and the feeling was still there. She could see that his forehead was too high, that a small scar cut a white stroke through his eyebrow. And his smile was pretty crooked, really. But it was as if something had changed inside Tally's head, something that had turned his face pretty to her.

In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.

Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.

It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else.

Why are you still wearing...?" Aya began. "Oh, that's not smart plastic? You're really an ugly?" David rolled his eyes and Shay said quietly, "David's never had any surge at all. But I wouldn't use the word ugly...Tally might eat you.

I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.

Have a little faith in me, Volger." "I have great faith, tempered with vast annoyance.

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

I used to be a pre-industrial writer: thousands of words in a spurt and then a few days off. But as I get older, I've switched to a mode best described as 'slow and steady wins the race.' Basically, I write during the same four hours every day, after breakfast and the all-important coffee, generally in the same room and wearing the same pajamas.

Dying is one of those things that can’t be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.

Reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.

Money's the same, whoever gives it to you. That was the point of money, after all: crisp and clean or wrinkled or disintegrated into quarters - a dollar was always worth a hundred cents.

Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.

One of the most common questions writers are asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.

The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

...I want those perfect eyes and lips, and for everyone to look at me and gasp. And for everyone who sees me to think Who's that? and want to get to know me, and listen to what I say." "I'd rather have something to say.

It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.

What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.

Making ourselves feel ugly is not fun." "We are ugly.

Ring around the rosie. A pocket full of posie. Ashes ashes, we all fall down. Some people say that this poem is about the Black Death, the fourteenth-century plague that killed 100-million people... Sadly, though, most experts think this is nonsense... How can I be so sure about this rhyme when all the experts disagree? Because I ate the kid who made it up.

I love you all. But it's time to say good-bye, for now. be careful with the world, or the next time we meet, it might get ugly. -Tally Youngblood

Now,young lady,I suppose you're here for a work assignment." Work?" Tally said. They both looked down at her puzzled expression, and Shay burst into laughter.

They walked with a pedatory grace.... one of them ripped off their hood and said, "my name is Tally Youngblood and is a special circumstance".

"Clear-cutting" was the word for what the Rusties had done to the old forests: felling every tree, killing every living thing, turning entire countries into grazing land. Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers. "Look, we're not clear-cutting. All we're doing is pulling out the garbage that the Rusties left behind,” David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it."

Maybe this was how you stayed sane in wartime: a handful of noble deeds amid the chaos.

We don't always get to choose what we love.

Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "make me pretty.

Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

Tally turned away. Five minutes was suddenly too long to stand here, eyes burning, unable to cry.

Maybe that was the price of loving someone: You lost your grasp of where they ended and you began.

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

That's how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.

A little drama wins more friends than boring.

I can’t imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

My name is tally youngblood and my mind is very ugly

Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.