Holly Black
Holly Black
Holly Black née Riggenbachis an American writer and editor best known for The Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of children's fantasy books she created with writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, and a trilogy of Young Adult novels officially called the Modern Faerie Tales trilogy. Her 2013 novel Doll Bones was named a Newbery Medal honor book...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth10 November 1971
CityWest Long Branch, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Kaye: You know what the sun looks like? Janet: No, What? Kaye: Like he slit his wrists in a bathtub and the blood is all over the water. Janet: That's gross, Kaye. Kaye: And the moon is just watching. She's just watching him die. She must have driven him to it.
What is it? For what do you scheme? Ethine's death would weigh on you and the stain of her blood would seep into your skin" "Do you know what they wish for when they give you the Unseelie crown?" Roiben's tone was soft, like he was telling a secret. Kaye could barely catch his words. "That you be made of ice. What makes you think it matters what I feel? What makes you think I feel anything at all?
You are the best kind of killer, Cassel Sharpe, the kind that never has blood on his hands. The kind that never has to sicken at the sight of what he's done, or come to like it too much.
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.
There's never really been a time when vampires weren't so over that you would be crazy to write a vampire book, or so huge that you would be crazy to write a vampire book. I'm not sure there's ever going to be a time. We went from Anne Rice to Buffy to 'Twilight.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I was a kid in the U.S., 'Doctor Who' wasn't really on, but you would occasionally catch an episode. Different stations did marathons.
You are the only thing I have that is neither duty nor obligation, the only thing I chose for myself. The only thing I want.
Clever girl. You play with fire because you want to be burnt.