Rick Yancey Quotes.
The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.
Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.
I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if I’d grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children.
A word of advice, Will Henry. When a person of the female gender says she wants to show you something, run the other way. The odds are it is not something you wish to see.
When the moment comes to stop running from your past, to turn around and face the thing you thought you could not face–the moment when your life teeters between giving up and getting up–when that moment comes, and it always comes, if you can’t get up and you can’t give up either, here’s what you do: Crawl.
How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.
I am the one, Not Running, Not Staying, But FACING
I’ve always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I’d probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated for a long while because it’s such well-trod ground.
Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves, as a matter of fact.
It’s almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there’s really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn’t mean there will be a tomorrow.
The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.
‘Tax Collector’ was optioned for a series with F/X, but it never happened. I guess they ran into a problem trying to figure out why someone would tune in to watch a show about a guy who works for the IRS.
When civilizations collide, it usually isn’t the more primitive one that prevails.
Maybe the last human being on Earth won’t die of starvation or exposure or as a meal of wild animals. Maybe the last one to die will be killed by the last one alive.
One of the joys of a really good book is that you’re so into the world of the book, you forget what you’re looking at is words on a page.
If I had faced it then, I wouldn’t be facing it now, but sooner or later you have to choose between running and facing the thing you thought you could not face.
You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars. You may not understand what I mean. You will.
I really kill myself on titles, although ‘The 5th Wave’ seems like an obvious title, doesn’t it? You don’t know how long that took me.
Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you’re inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.
I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I’ve forgotten to back up the manuscript?
I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don’t know what real loneliness is until you’ve known the opposite.
Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky.
It’s hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is not something you planned for.
You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.
My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first ‘Alfred Kropp’ book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish – until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After that, it was off to the races, and I am so glad.
‘The 5th Wave’ is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?
The aliens of ‘The 5th Wave’ are not the aliens we’ve imagined. Not the aliens we’d like to attack us.
I got a very late start at fatherhood. I’m a late bloomer in general. It took me seven years to get through four years of college. I was five years away from 40 before I had a family, and I had never been around kids much at all. All of a sudden, I was around three boys all the time.
Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.
You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don’t have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn’t mean they apply to you.
So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, ‘Okay, now I’m going to write something for us old folks.’ I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.
My first favourite book was ‘Are You My Mother?’ A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure.
