Greg Van Eekhout Quotes

#1. I don't think that eating bones is necessarily gruesome unless you're a vegetarian.

Greg Van Eekhout

#2. Magic is like pulling the pin on a grenade and then stuffing it down your pants to see what happens.

Greg Van Eekhout

#3. Middle grade fiction, to me, is really about emergence of self. It's about expressing the idea that the world is going to start affecting you more, and your parents' influence is going to wane. Middle grade is when a lot of kids discover their passions - art, music, sports, what have you.

Greg Van Eekhout

#4. To act as though we have hope is to keep hope alive

Greg Van Eekhout

#5. More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.

Greg Van Eekhout

#6. In everything I write, I'm always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.

Greg Van Eekhout

#7. I think there's only one reason to write in any genre or to any particular age group: You are called to it. You think it'd be fun.

Greg Van Eekhout

#8. 'California Bones' is the first volume in my trilogy about Daniel Blackland, a wizard trying to survive in a world that eats wizards. It's a book about friends and family, trust and betrayal, the love of power and the power of love.

Greg Van Eekhout

#9. There's a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn't really my thing, maybe because I didn't grow up playing RPG's.

Greg Van Eekhout

#10. The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.

Greg Van Eekhout

#11. As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.

Greg Van Eekhout

#12. In high school, I stole a six-foot submarine sandwich from a banquet room in front of several hundred people. I did it because I was in marching band, and we were promised food if we played, and they broke their promise. It was my first and only heist, motivated by justice and hunger.

Greg Van Eekhout

#13. Being part of the original 'Star Wars' generation, I have always known a dark future.

Greg Van Eekhout

#14. I feel lucky that my career so far has included books for adults and books for kids. They're equally important to me, and I hope I get to continue writing both.

Greg Van Eekhout

#15. Because we're not what we eat. We're what we do, and what we sacrifice, and what we love. And if we choose right more often than we choose wrong, we become who we want to be.

Greg Van Eekhout

#16. I try to eat vegetarian, though I'm not very good at it, and it's a work in progress. But we basically are what we eat. Eat fat, and there's fat in your body. Eat protein, and there's protein in your body. Eat magic, and there's magic in your body.

Greg Van Eekhout