Top 100 Scott Westerfeld Quotes
#1. Make a list of all the varieties of aliens you can come up with. (And if it's less than 3,000, then THE PEARS ARE LAUGHING AT YOU, MY FRIEND.) -Scott Westerfeld from NaNoWriMo Pep Talk.
Scott Westerfeld
#2. You don't think happy endings are stupid anymore?"
"Your question is irrelevant," Imogen said. "This isn't the end.
Scott Westerfeld
#3. The whole idea that he could take what he wanted without affecting anyone was bull****.
Scott Westerfeld
#6. Jen's an impact player, a spoiled brat, a royal pain-in-the-ass, and she rewires me like nothing else.
Scott Westerfeld
#7. Maybe human beings are programmed ... to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad ...
Scott Westerfeld
#8. You're still yourself on the inside, Shay. But when you're pretty, people pay more attention." "Not everyone thinks that way.
Scott Westerfeld
#9. Nate liked money. It was a sleek and clever invention, beautiful in the way it lubricated power and focused people's attention. But it had a clumsy, brutal side, too. Money bludgeoned people without it into silence, shut them away in neighborhoods like this.
Scott Westerfeld
#11. Alek coughed politely, "If I promise to avoid funny business, could you perhaps remove this knife from my throat?
Scott Westerfeld
#12. For me, writing's the only thing that's always real. I've never regretted a day I wrote a good scene, whatever else I screwed up that day. That's what's fucking real.
Scott Westerfeld
#13. Around the outskirts of the city, cut off from town by the black oval of the river, everything was in darkness. Everyone ugly was in bed by now.
Scott Westerfeld
#14. Most men's awareness doesn't extend past their dinner plates.
Scott Westerfeld
#15. Because that's what people need after traumas, apparently - lots of long conversations about the effects of trauma.
Scott Westerfeld
#17. It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else.
Scott Westerfeld
#18. I expect that you must receive top marks at school, young lady."
Madeleine smiled as she stirred her tea. "There are always rewards for those who state the obvious frequently and with conviction.
Scott Westerfeld
#20. But you know what? It's not my behavior I'm worried about anymore. It's yours.
Scott Westerfeld
#21. You young things are too easily persuaded by the touch of lips.
Scott Westerfeld
#23. I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.
Scott Westerfeld
#25. The difference between being a part-time writer and a full-time writer is like the difference between dating someone and living with them. Some of the romance is gone, but you learn things you'd never know just by dating.
Scott Westerfeld
#26. Sometimes it felt like her life was a series of falls from ever-greater heights.
Scott Westerfeld
#27. The lie took form as she spoke, pulling on as many strands of truth as it could reach.
Scott Westerfeld
#28. One of the most common questions writers are asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.
Scott Westerfeld
#29. Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.
Scott Westerfeld
#30. You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters! seemed
Scott Westerfeld
#31. Dying is one of those things that can't be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.
Scott Westerfeld
#32. Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.
Scott Westerfeld
#33. She smiled, turning toward Alek. You don't know what a friend you have in Dylan.
Scott Westerfeld
#34. But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.
Scott Westerfeld
#35. Money's the same, whoever gives it to you. That was the point of money, after all: crisp and clean or wrinkled or disintegrated into quarters - a dollar was always worth a hundred cents.
Scott Westerfeld
#36. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. - Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, Of Beauty
Scott Westerfeld
#37. I knew what she was asking, of course. I'd been asking it myself a moment before. But I wasn't sure how you went from dreams to reality without the magic leaking out - or becoming too wild and powerful.
Scott Westerfeld
#39. We don't have to look like everyone else...and act like everyone else. We've got a choice. We can grow up any way we want...It's about becoming what I want to become, not what some surgical committee thinks I should.
Scott Westerfeld
#40. She would find her answers in the words she wrote, in the stories she told, not by asking for permission.
Scott Westerfeld
#42. Sometimes the thoughts in my head get so bored they go out for a stroll through my mouth. This is rarely a good thing.
Scott Westerfeld
#43. But I feel more real when I'm around her. Like I'm not fading.
Scott Westerfeld
#44. You're insane!" she shouted.
"Pretty cool, huh?"
"No!"Tally yelled. "Why didn't you tell me it was broken?"
Shay shrugged. "More fun that way?"
"More fun?" Her heart beating fast,her vision strangely clear. She was full of anger and relief and ... joy.
"Well, kind of. But you suck!
Scott Westerfeld
#45. Let me get this stright, Aya-Chan. You want me, a person who can't lie, to lie about the fact that I can't lie?
-Frizz mizuno
Scott Westerfeld
#46. There was a long pause. "Um, I'm afraid I don't know the word in English."
"The word for what?"
"I just said I don't *know* it!
Scott Westerfeld
#47. Which was worse: a friend with brain damage, or one who despised you?
Scott Westerfeld
#48. Hoverboarding looks so fun, like being a bird. But actually doing it is hard work."
Shay shrugged. "Being a bird's probably hard work too. Flapping your wings all day, you know?
Scott Westerfeld
#49. That's where the money is in publishing - people who don't read.
Scott Westerfeld
#50. The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there'd been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.
Scott Westerfeld
#51. Have a little faith in me, Volger." "I have great faith, tempered with vast annoyance.
Scott Westerfeld
#52. Suddenly a pair of searchlights lanced out from the frigate. They swept across the dark expanse - bright knives slicing the night into pieces.
Scott Westerfeld
#54. When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, There arises the recognition of ugliness. When they all know the good as good, There arises the recognition of evil. - Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching
Scott Westerfeld
#55. Controlling someone by changing their brain is like trying to stop a hovercar by digging a ditch. If they think hard enough, they can fly right over.
Scott Westerfeld
#56. Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder.
Scott Westerfeld
#59. History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.
Scott Westerfeld
#60. Just remember, the things we write, they aren't always really us.
Scott Westerfeld
#62. Battered by the mind noise, huddled in the back with eyes closed and fists clenched, the old Melissa had understood pep rallies about as well as a bird sucked through a jet engine comprehended aircraft design.
Scott Westerfeld
#63. Some mornings when I wake up, it takes a long time to remember who I am. Like, it takes a while for everything that's happened in last month to download into my brain. It's nice, not knowing. Even if it's just for five minutes.
Scott Westerfeld
#65. Once there was a girl named Riley, the story began. Her heart was a secret garden, its stone walls cracked and weathered. And it was hungry. p160
Scott Westerfeld
#67. The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects. Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine.
Scott Westerfeld
#71. She was a soldier, not some girl twisting her skirts at a village dance.
Scott Westerfeld
#72. Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.
Scott Westerfeld
#76. Nice concept. But is it a trilogy or a tweet?" "I can't tell any more.
Scott Westerfeld
#77. When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.
Scott Westerfeld
#78. Aya, that's the barking strangest thing about battle - that it's real
Scott Westerfeld
#79. You'd best ask the lady boffin, sir," Newkirk said. "Midshipmen aren't allowed to have opinions.
Scott Westerfeld
#80. My compliments," Alek said slowly and evenly. "Your contempt was most convincing."
"I am your servant.
Scott Westerfeld
#81. But doesn't real love work the other way round?" Kiralee asked. "You start by thinking someone's fabulous, and by the end of the piece you realize he's a monster!
Scott Westerfeld
#82. Deryn was quite astounding, really, and entirely worth throwing away an empire for.
Scott Westerfeld
#83. Without lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas. All around her Tally felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode.
Scott Westerfeld
#84. And here in America rival newspapermen attack each other on sight?
Scott Westerfeld
#85. I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people.
Scott Westerfeld
#86. Did you really think I was too fragile to know what Deryn was?"
"Fragile?" Volger looked about. "I hadn't thought so, but now I find you brooding in a bathroom. This doesn't speak well of your sturdiness.
Scott Westerfeld
#88. Being fathomed was even better than being flattered, it turned out.
Scott Westerfeld
#89. We needed to become world-famous soon, while there was still that kind of world to be famous in ...
Scott Westerfeld
#90. The guy walking past was wearing a shit five sizes too big (innovated by gangbangers to hide guns in their waistbands), shorts down below his knees (innovated by surfers to keep their thighs from getting sunburned), and oversized shoes (innovated by skaters to save their feet from injury).
Scott Westerfeld
#91. Ah. So he's forgotten the most important rule of warfare.
Which is ...
That nothing ever goes to plan.
Scott Westerfeld
#92. The opening chapter was the book's unique selling point, the singular idea that had carried Darcy through last November, and Coleman had just come up with it off the top of his head.
Scott Westerfeld
#93. (T)he real world worked differently than stories. In a novel you always knew the moment when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefinables, and things that just happened on their own.
Scott Westerfeld
#95. Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.
Scott Westerfeld
#96. Now,young lady,I suppose you're here for a work assignment."
Work?" Tally said.
They both looked down at her puzzled expression, and Shay burst into laughter.
Scott Westerfeld
#97. Tally, do you ever suffer from sudden flashes of anger or euphoria, countersocial impulses, or feelings of superiority?
Scott Westerfeld
#98. And hidden within the agony the strange clarity came again, as if the world had ordered itself into something that made perfect sense.
Scott Westerfeld
#99. Growing up like rewriting is simply admitting how clueless you were not so long ago.
Scott Westerfeld
#100. It's exciting. But you can't keep fighting the way things are forever.
Scott Westerfeld
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