Patrick Ness Quotes
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Here is the boy, drowning.
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The books I like to read the most feel like they've been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.
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Conor was no longer invisible. They all saw him now. But he was further away than ever.
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How you leave the reader is so important - not the climax; I call it the 'exit feeling'.
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I don’t know what’s ahead,” I say. “I don’t know nothing about nothing but whatever it is, it’s gotta be better than what’s behind. It’s gotta be.
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We have lost the idea that something can be secret because it is valuable, not because it's shameful. If you share everything with everybody, what have you got for yourself? I tweet and I blog, but I save a lot for myself. Not because I am ashamed.
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This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.
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The world is cynical and sarcastic, but that doesn't mean that that's always the truth.
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A knife is only as good as the one who wields it.
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A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative. That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.
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I meet blind and partially-sighted young readers all the time, and it's a shock that so few books are available to them.
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I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.
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If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.
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Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.
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A man is capable of thought. A crowd is not.
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The ability to make fire at will. It allowed us light to see in the darkness, warmth against the cold, a tool to cook our food.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Delta’s engines. ‘Fire is what eventually led to travel across the black beyond, the ability to start a new life on a New World.
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Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.
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Anything that anybody wants to give me is great! I've had folk songs, heavy metal songs, jewellery... I would never call anything any fan gives me weird, as it's how people express what they like about the books, what it means to them, and that's a wonderful thing.
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It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.
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It's always darkest before the dawn, Todd.” I look at him, baffled. “No, it ain't! What kinda stupid saying is that? It's always lightest before the dawn!
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I write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.
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When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.
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I live in England, so I take a lot of trains, and you can't really go anywhere without somebody talking on their mobile phone behind you, forcing you to listen to their conversation. With the Internet, with texting, with networking sites, there's already information everywhere.
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It's really important to me not to be a snob about age division or about genre or whatever. The story needs to be what the story needs to be.