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.Collection: Dating
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.Collection: Design
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.Collection: Design
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.
Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image.
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.
Luckily for writers - and unluckily for history - every scientific idea creates human conflict.
I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college.
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.
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.
When the term 'machine gun' enters common parlance, the word 'machine' becomes much more sinister.
I moved to New York when I was 21 or 22 as a graduate fellow.
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.
Warning stickers on books would be a nightmare.
What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.Collection: Beauty
...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.Collection: Eye
It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.Collection: Matter
Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.Collection: Love
The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.Collection: Beautiful
Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.Collection: Destroying
Ah. So he's forgotten the most important rule of warfare. Which is... That nothing ever goes to plan.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Brain
In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.Collection: World
Reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.Collection: Reality
"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."Collection: Country
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Home
Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.Collection: Life
The lie took form as she spoke, pulling on as many strands of truth as it could reach.Collection: Lying
You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.Collection: Way
The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Real
Making ourselves feel ugly is not fun." "We are ugly.Collection: Fun
My name is tally youngblood and my mind is very uglyCollection: Names
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Cutting
Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.Collection: Book
Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.Collection: Ideas
When the term "machine gun" enters common parlance, the word "machine" becomes much more sinister.Collection: Gun
We needed to become world-famous soon, while there was still that kind of world to be famous in.Collection: World
Apparently textbooks were an endangered species here in Bixby, Oklahoma.Collection: Oklahoma
You young things are too easily persuaded by the touch of lips.Collection: Lips
What if destiny doesn't care?Collection: Destiny
To everyone who loves a long-secret romance, revealed at last.Collection: Long
Where did you get that idea for a nose? - Frizz MizunoCollection: Ideas
Gravity was something you could beat; all it took was hydrogen, hot air, or even a bit of rope. But being a girl was a miserable, never-ending struggle.Collection: Girl
Wow," came a familiar voice, "Hypochondriac killed the cat." -DessCollection: Cat
Your father always suspected that being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain—Maddy glanced at Tally—and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities. He always thought that some people could think their way out of it.Collection: Father
Not everything made you stronger. It was possible to survive, yet still be crippled for your trouble. Sometimes it was okay to run away, to skip the test, to chicken out. Or at least to get some help.Collection: Running