Koja's Quotes

#1. The fox and the nightingale made a quiet life together. A lesser creature might have held Koja's mistakes against him, might have mocked him for his pride. But Lula was not only clever. She was wise.

Leigh Bardugo

#2. Even an empty road leads somewhere, right?

Kathe Koja

#3. I never consciously choose what I'm going to work on next; I don't have an agenda beyond that attraction. Fortunately, my wonderful agent, Christopher Schelling, knows how I think and points me toward things I might like, which is how I started writing Y.A.

Kathe Koja

#4. The verge, he likes to say. That's where we want them, the utter, utter verge.

Kathe Koja

#5. People react differently to puppets than they do to human performers: they become more playful, more open.

Kathe Koja

#6. Y.A. wasn't really a specific genre when I was fifteen, but if it was, I would probably have shunned it; I was a huge snob.

Kathe Koja

#7. [Lindsay] But I don't want to think about all that now, Boring Blake and his broken heart which is really his deflated dick, that's all he cares about anyway...

Kathe Koja

#8. The stage is not only a world apart, it is a myriad of worlds, and in those worlds a man can have anything he fancies, if only he believes in what he sees.

Kathe Koja

#9. I knew that change was coming, the way you know things you can't see, by feeling them; by instinct. The way the bees know everything they know.

Kathe Koja

#10. If there is any God in this world, He lives in a theatre.

Kathe Koja

#11. Despair often breeds disease.

Sophocles

#12. To work and work and never mind why; if you kept looking for the why behind everything you might never work again, you might never bother to breathe again.

Kathe Koja

#13. You see, that hunger inside us, that ambition, or whatever you may choose to call it, is a compass really, a compass of true desire. And if you will be happy, you must follow that desire, no matter which way the needle points.

Kathe Koja

#14. You go through it like a dark room, you sweat, you fear, the fear passes, you come out of it and utter nothing but meaningless words about what you saw or felt.

Parke Godwin

#15. Yet we choose to remember history very selectively, favoring foresight over failure.

Thomas Rid

#16. But if Koja had words, then he had hope.

Leigh Bardugo

#17. If I could have broken his neck I would have, just for the pleasure of the silence after the snap.

Kathe Koja

#18. I have one rule when adapting any text: nothing gets added; all the words are the original author's own. But in the ordering and recreation of the story, I can do as I please, and to me, the heart and the point of 'Dracula' is appetite.

Kathe Koja

#19. I'm just going to jump and say:hey Mom, Dad, I'm gay, What's for dessert?

Kathe Koja

#20. 'Alice in Wonderland' has been done a million times; why do it again? Nerve's answer is that Alice is Everyman and Everywoman, going through the stages of life.

Kathe Koja

#21. My course is set for an uncharted sea.

Dante Alighieri

#22. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

Kathe Koja

#23. You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

Annie Dillard