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
You're not the way everyone says you are," Kaye said, looking at him so fiercely that he couldn't meet her gaze. "I know you're not." "You know nothing of me," he said. He wanted to punish her for the trust he saw on her face, to raze it from her now so that he would be spared the sight of her when that trust was betrayed. He wanted to tell her he found her impossibly alluring, at least half enchanted, body bruised and scratched, utterly unaware she would not live past dawn. He wondered what she would say in the face of that.
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.
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.
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'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 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.