Holly Black quotes:

Inspiration comes from everywhere. From life, observing people, etc. From movies and books you love. From research.

Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.

I revise a lot while I'm drafting, often going back to the beginning again and again to revise because I've changed massive things about the story. By the time I get to the end of a first draft, I've been through the beginning lots of times.

I have to spring a cat out of Rumelt Animal Shelter. Think of it as a prison break." It does the trick. He laughs. "Whose cat?" "My cat. What do you think? That I break out the cats of strangers?" "Let me guess, she was framed. She's innocent.

I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.

I'm afraid that whatever I touch is spoilt by the contact." "I'm not scared of being spoiled," Val said.

Clever girl. You play with fire because you want to be burnt.

I read 'Sabella or The Blood Stone' by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith's writing. She's just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.

Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.

I'm going to take off your gag.And if you try to bite me or grab me or anything, I'll hit you with this thing as hard as I can as many times as I can. Understood?"- Tana to Gavriel, page 20 chapter 3

In the older folklore, faeries were frightening beings. In fact, it was such a bad idea to get their attention that people would use flattering euphemisms for them, such as 'the people of peace,' 'the little people,' and 'the good neighbors.'

I am not very good at sticking to outlines, and I double back all the time to revisit scenes and change things.

A mortal had woven it, a man who, having caught sight of the Seelie queen, had spent the remainder of his short life weaving depictions of her. He had died of starvation, raw, red fingers staining the final tapestry.

I really love being a weirdo who writes a lot of different things for a lot of different ages. I have been considering doing a guide on my website so that a reader who liked one of my books could find the other books that he or she might like, because I know some of the books are really different from the rest.

One of my favorite things in books is watching someone make the mistake. You know it's going to happen. You keep thinking: 'Don't do it!' But of course they're going to do it. It's riveting. You learn through them that it's okay. It's the ecstatic fall, where you watch someone make that terrible decision, and there's such pleasure in it.

What I've always loved about faeries is the way that they, unlike so many other supernatural creatures, are not human and have never been human. They have different customs and different taboos, and woe to anyone who breaks them.

Into every generation comes a vampire.

If curiosity killed the cat, it was satisfaction that brought it back.

Faeries are associated with wild untamed nature, with art, and with death - so the folklore is rich with different stories to explore.

Dead or not, I have come for his heart and I will have it.

Greg stands up, wiping his mouth"I saw your mother's trial in the paper, Sharpe. I know you're just like her.""If I was, I would make you beg to blow me," I sneer.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder."

I've loved vampires for a very long time. In eighth grade, I guess, my research paper was on vampires.

Growing up, my mom was a painter, my best friend was a painter, my husband is a painter. For a long time I knew artists, and I didn't know any writers.

One of the great things about writing middle-grade books is that it's really a nice break, when you're writing super intense stuff like 'Coldtown', to be able to write something a little lighter - calm down and do something different.

I'm not very good at explaining things," she said. "But I think you have beautiful eyes. I love the gold in them. I love that they're different from my eyes- I see mine all the time and I'm bored with them.

The first boy I fell in love with didn't know I loved him, but he managed to break my heart anyway.

I think there's a reason that horror appeals to teens. There's a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again.

When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.

Anyone who offers their heart on a silver platter deserves what they get.

We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I'm not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam's homework, bit if it is, his physics teacher is awesome.

Life's full of opportunities to make crappy decisions that feel good. And after the first one, the rest get a whole lot easier.

Yeah, the whole family knows. It's no big deal. One night at dinner I said, 'Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.' It was easier for her to understand that way.

She sat in the dew-damp grass and ripped up clumps of it, tossing them in the air and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Some gnome ought to pop out of the tree and scold her for torturing the lawn.

Instead, it just reminded her that sometimes there were no good choices.

Isn't every hero aware of all the terrible reason they did those good deeds?" Aware of every mistake they ever made and how good people got hurt because of their decisions? Don't they recall the moments they weren't heroic at all? The moments where their heroism led to more deaths than deliberate villainy ever could?

You're yourself," Tana said, grinning. "More purely yourself than anyone I know. And if you can't see who that is anymore, then see yourself the way I see you.

I heard you've been having some problems with your girlfriend." Headmistress Northcutt says. "No," I say. "Not at all." Audrey broke up with me after the winter holiday, exhausted by my moodiness. It's impossible to have problems with a girlfriend who's no longer mine.

Boys never believe I can beat them, she told me back then. But I always win in the end.

I don't lie," I lied.

Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.

If we have to be cat burglars, I'm going to see what' to steal in the fridge." We're trying to find evidence she's the poisoner. Just a thought before you start putting random things in your mouth." Ruth shrugged and walked past Val.

She took a deep breath, "Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?" His expression turned very strange, almost as if she'd struck him, "yes," he said finally. -Tana and Gavriel-page 33- chapter 5

Those who really love you don't mean to hurt you and if they do, you can't see it in their eyes but it hurts them too.

Mutually assured destruction.

Nevermore," Lolli said. "That's what Luis calls it, because there are three rules: Never more than once a day, never more than a pinch at a time, and never more than two days in a row.

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.

Yesterday when we went over the plan again and again, I never thought about Grandad showing up. Because I'm an idiot, basically--an idiot with poor planning skills. Of course he's here. Where else would he be? Seriously, what else could go wrong?

Because I am about to be devoured by poodles," I quip. "Remember me always, my love.

I haven't had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone's dead and my root beer's gone.

You both ... you both saved me?" "Come on," said Luis. "You make it sound like it was hard for Val to go to the Unseelie Court, strike a deal with Roiben, challenge Mabry to a duel, win back your heart, and then get back here during rush hour.

Tana would sit near the door to the basement with fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana's little bed. 'Make her stop' Pearl said, but Tana couldn't.

The inside is packed with people. Lots of them crowding the bar, passing drinks back for people to carry to tables. A bunch of guys are pouring shots of vodka.To Zacharov! one toasts.To open hearts and open bars! calls another.And open legs, says Anton.

Everyone danced -- sweaty bodies packed tight, drunk with sound.

I like all the things that make you monstrous.

He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones as sharp as blades, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His black hair a mad forest of dirty curls.

This is the part in the movie where that guy says, "Zombies? What zombies?" just before they eat his brains. I don't want to be that guy.

I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don't even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I'm going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn't involve dying.

Oh- and grab the plastic bag over by my suitcase."I slug down the last of the coffee and get up. The bag contains panty hose. I put them on her desk."They're for you.""You want me to look homeless, desperate, but also kind of fabulous?

She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.

You can always count on your family to love you. And to betray you. And then to feel guilty about it.

Once someone's hurt you, it's harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn't stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.

I survive at the edge of friends circles.

There don't have to be first dates and second dates. We're not normal. We can do this anyway you want. A relationship can be whatever you want it to be. We get to make this part up. We get to tell our own story.

I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.

I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain.

I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.

No trouble ever got fixed late at night," he said. "Midnight is for regrets.

They wore their strange beauty like war paint.

She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.

The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.

... on the lawn one late summer day, her pale hair tangled because she'd cry if anyone tried to brush it, spinning around and around until she got so dizzy she fell in a pile of bare feet and dandelions and sundress.

You and your sister are very dear to each other. To show your regard, you give each other lovely bouquets of lies.

The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.

Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.

Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.

What an author doesn't know could fill a book.

Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.

This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.

In those stories, one is often asked to do something unimaginably terrible to the creature. Cut off it's head, say. A test. Not a test of love. A test of trust. Trust lifts the spell.

I would remain nearer you for what time there is." "Gone in one faerie sigh," she quoted. Leather-clad fingers brushed over her short hair, rested on her cheek. "I can hold my breath.

I got bored," he says. "Besides, you know what's creepier than walking around your dead brothers' apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.

in her dreams, blood tasted like fizzy strawberry soda. If you drank it too fast, you got brain freeze. When she was older, after she'd licked a cut on her finger, the taste of that became the taste in her dreams: copper and tears.

You're a pretty cool customer, huh?" says Agent Hunt. "I hide my inner pain under my stoic visage." Agent Hunt looks like he would like to put his fist through my stoic visage.

There is nothing for her beyond those gates," Gavriel said. "Do you think to bring her along like a talisman to remind you of your humanity? Or do you think sharing your damnation will lighten the burden of it?

I'm not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria. But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn't make sense. All friendships are negotiations of power.

I don't feel prolific. I feel like I'm plodding along. Each day you sit down, and you hope that you get your work done.

It's not that I want you to be a certain way--don't you want a boyfriend?" "Why bother with that? Let's find incubi." "Incubi?" "Demons. Plural. Like octopi. And we're much more likely to find them"--her voice dropped conspiratorially--"while swimming naked in the Atlantic a week before Halloween than practically anywhere else I can think of.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

I think there are a lot of really positive aspects to social media for novelists. Even though our work is pretty solitary, through Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram and blogging in general, we're better able to connect directly with readers.

Twilight' passed like a fever through the sophisticated reader and the unsophisticated reader alike. People devoured those books in single sittings, over weekends, with a kind of raw intensity that is rare.

I loved Anne Rice's 'Interview with a Vampire' and 'The Vampire Lestat'. I found a copy of 'Interview' when I was in seventh grade at a garage sale for 25 cents. It had a crazy cover.

I really love the idea of the poetically mad - the character that is imbued with the romantic madness. Like River from 'Firefly' or Drusilla from 'Buffy.' Someone dangerously unhinged, where you're really not sure they're going to be reliable minute-to-minute.

I wrote a book called 'Doll Bones', which was another middle-grade book, and when I was writing it, I needed a place in the U.S. that made bone china. And there are only two places in the U.S. that make bone china. They made it by grinding down actual cow bones. It was a plot point. It was a creepy doll book.

A girl like that, Grandad said, perfumes herself with ozone and metal filings.

A man may daydream of how he would spend a million dollars, but playing the same game with a billion dollars sours the fantasy. There are too many possibilities. The house he once wished for with all his heart is suddenly too small. The travel, too cheap. He wanted to visit an island. Now he contemplates buying one.

A second book that makes you rethink the first book is the Holy Grail of a series.

A stray dog, I might understand," she said. "But this? You are too softhearted." No, Mabry," Ravus said. "I am not." He looked in Val's direction. "I think she wants to die." Maybe you can help her after all," Mabry said. "You're good at helping people die.

Ah coffee. The sweet balm by which we shall accomplish today's tasks.

All friendships are negotiations of power.

And if I wanted to kill myself, I wouldn't throw myself off a roof. And if I was going to throw myself off a roof, I would put on some pants before I did it.

And stupid. Brave and Stupid." Ravus smiled, but then his smile sagged. "But nothing can stop you from being terrible once you've learned how.

Are you sure?" Aidan asked, "Gavriel's still a vampire." "He warned me about you and about them. He didn't have to. I'm not going to repay that by-" she hesitated, then frowned. "What did you call him?" "That's his name," Aidan sighed, "Gavriel. The other vampires, while they were tying me to the bed, they said his name." "Oh." With a final tug she pulled the blanked free and tossed it over to 'Gavriel' -Tana and Aidan-page 23-chapter 3

As the last Seelie left the hall, Roiben, self-declared King of the Unseelie Court, nearly fell into his throne. Kaye tried to smile at him, but he was not looking at her. He was staring out across the brugh with eyes the color of falling ash. Corny had not stopped laughing.

As Val jumped down onto the litter-strewn concrete after them, she thought how insane it was to follow two people she didn't know into the bowels of the subway, but instead of being afraid, she felt glad. She would make all her own decisions now, even if they were ruinous ones. It was the same pleasurable feeling as tearing a piece of paper into tiny, tiny pieces.

At the end of a criminal's life, it's always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left. I've heard Grandad's war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell. Birth to grave, we know it'll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

Baby," she says in a harsh whisper, "in this world, lots of people will try to grind you down. They need you to be small so they can be big. You let them think whatever they want, but you make sure you get yours. You get yours.

Being infected, being a vampire, it' s always you. Maybe it' s more you than ever before. It' s you as you always were, deep down inside.

But if you didn't believe in monsters, then how were you going to be able to keep safe from them?

But now I wonder--what if everyone is pretty much the same and it's just a thousand small choices that add up to the person you are? No good or evil, no black and white, no inner demons or angels whispering the right answers in our ears like it's some cosmic SAT test. Just us, hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day,making the best choices we can. The thought is horrifying. If that's true, then there's no right choice. There's only choice.

But the Courts aren't places humans are supposed to be, especially the Unseelie Court. Most faeries won't even go there." We have to go - we have to get Ravus's heart. He's going to die if we don't." what are we going to do? Go down there and ask for it?" Pretty much.

Can't get away from your own self.

Carney is like a graveyard where everyone already owns their plots and has built houses on top of them.

Changing is what people do when they have no options left.

Cold?" Ravus echoed. He took her arm and rubbed it between his hands, watching them as though they were betraying him. "Better?" He asked warily. His skin felt hot, even through the cloth of her shirt, his touch was both soothing and electric. She leaned into him without thinking. His thighs parted, rough black cloth scratching against her jeans as she moved between his long legs. His eyes half-lidded as he pushed himself off the desk, their bodies sliding together, his hands still holding hers. Then, suddenly, he froze.

Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty.

Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.

Death's favorites don't die.

Don't be drinking the Haterade.