Robin McKinley quotes

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.
-- Robin McKinley

#Book #Writing #Ideas

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.
-- Robin McKinley

#Writing #Thinking #Justice

When they finished laughing they were on their way to being not just friends, but the dearest of friends, the sort of friends whose lives are shaped by the friendship.
-- Robin McKinley

#Laughing #Just Friends #Way

For anyone who is: just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it'll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.
-- Robin McKinley

#Reading #Writing #Giving

The story is always better than your ability to write it.
-- Robin McKinley

#Writing #Rejection #Stories

There are things you don't want to know you can do
-- Robin McKinley

#Want

I get a little cranky with the whole business about kids not having attention spans. This reminds me of the usual business of thinking that the next generation is hopeless. Every generation has said that about every younger generation.
-- Robin McKinley

#Kids #Thinking #Generations

[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.
-- Robin McKinley

#Children #Reading #Adventure

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you. Can I trust him? What do I have to lose?
-- Robin McKinley

#Trust Me #Said

What was new was the fact that, despite my heart doing its fight-or-flight, help-we're-prey-and-HEY-STUPID-THAT'S-A-VAMPIRE number, I was glad to see him. Ridiculous but true. Scary but true.
-- Robin McKinley

#Stupid #Heart #Fighting

I said: "He cannot be so bad if he loves roses so much." "But he is a Beast," said Father helplessly. I saw that he was weakening, and wishing only to comfort him I said, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?
-- Robin McKinley

#Father #Rose #Wish

...like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?
-- Robin McKinley

#Ocean #Oysters #What If

What I write, if you have to label it, is crossover, and I think that much of the stuff that is called children's or YA is in fact crossover and is equally valid for anyone who likes to read fantasy.
-- Robin McKinley

#Children #Writing #Thinking

Mathin said: "It is best to take your opponent's sash. The kysin mark each blow dealt, but to cut off the other rider's sash is best. This you will do." "Oh," said Harry. "You may, if you wish, unhorse him first," Mathin added as an afterthought. "Thanks," said Harry.
-- Robin McKinley

#Cutting #Blow #Wish

My sheets had never been so clean as they had in the past few months. I hardly got them on again before something else happened and I was feverishly ripping them off and stuffing them in the wash with double amounts of soap and all the "extra" buttons pushed: extra wash, extra rinse, extra water, extra spin, extra protection against things that go bump in the night.
-- Robin McKinley

#Past #Night #Water

Stay a little while longer, and let everyone congratulate you - including the ones who clearly don't want to: in fact, especially the ones who clearly don't want to. You don't have to say anything but 'thank you
-- Robin McKinley

#Say Anything #Littles #Facts

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus.
-- Robin McKinley

#Princess #Pegasus

You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.
-- Robin McKinley

#Military #Government #Littles

At least I was true. My intellectual abilities gave me a release, and an excuse. I shunned company because I preferred books; and the dreams I confided to my father were of becoming a scholar in good earnest, and going to University. It was unheard-of several shocked governesses were only too quick to tell me, when I spoke a little too boldly -- but my father nodded and smiled and said, 'We'll see.' Since I believed my father could do anything -- except of course make me pretty -- I worked and studied with passionate dedication, lived in hope, and avoided society and mirrors.
-- Robin McKinley

#Dream #Father #Book

It seems to me further, that it is very odd that fate should leave so careful a trail, and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.
-- Robin McKinley

#Fate #Littles #Odd

My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl 'Write me! Write me now!' But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying 'Wait for me! Wait for me!' and waving my notebook in the air.
-- Robin McKinley

#Notebook #Running #Horse

Sometimes it is better not to know. Sometimes when you do know you just fold up.
-- Robin McKinley

#Sometimes

It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)
-- Robin McKinley

#Intelligent #Animal #Long

Can't all beasts be tamed?
-- Robin McKinley

#Beast

Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for....
-- Robin McKinley

#Color #Answers

Beauty: "You called me beautiful last night." Beast: "You do not believe me then?" Beauty: "Well - no. Any number of mirrors have told me otherwise." Beast: "You will find no mirrors here, for I cannot bear them: nor any quiet water in ponds. And since I am the only one who sees you, why are you not then beautiful?
-- Robin McKinley

#Beautiful #Believe #Night

Write what you want to read. The person you know best in this world is you. Listen to yourself. If you are excited by what you are writing, you have a much better chance of putting that excitement over to a reader.
-- Robin McKinley

#Writing #World #Want

Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose.
-- Robin McKinley

#Dark #Sight #Roots

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper.
-- Robin McKinley

#Moving #Paper #Facts

But the uproar this caused was nothing compared with the uproar when Katronia noticed [Rosie] had also cut her eyelashes. Various negotiations (including, finally, such desperate measures as "supposing you ever want to eat again") eventually produced the grudging promise that, in return for Katronia keeping her hair cut short, she would leave her eyelashes alone.
-- Robin McKinley

#Cutting #Hair #Eyelashes

I long for another human face just as I fear it.
-- Robin McKinley

#Long #Faces #Humans

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.
-- Robin McKinley

#Culture #Levels #Grassroots

Why do you tell me... so much?" Luthe considered her. "I tell you... some you need to know, and some you have earned the right to know, and some it won't hurt you to know--" He stopped.... "Some things I tell you only because I wish to tell them to you.
-- Robin McKinley

#Hurt #Wish #Needs

Your attitude is perhaps a little unnecessarily rigorous," suggested Jack.
-- Robin McKinley

#Attitude #Littles

I smiled. "I understand now. But It doesn't matter and you needn't apologize. They have been very kind to me too. Even if we did differ a little about suitable dresses." He considered me a moment, a mischievous light creeping into his eyes, and said: "Was THAT the dress - that night you wouldn't come out of your room?" I grinned and nodded, and we both laughed;
-- Robin McKinley

#Eye #Night #Light

the bus timetable sites are all run by an inbred cabal of malicious gnomes. Who don’t speak English. And who don’t count very well either. Or tell time. And they certainly can’t read maps.
-- Robin McKinley

#Running #Maps #Inbreds

Perhaps it is a human thing, to look upon such beauty and fail to encompass it.
-- Robin McKinley

#Looks #Failing #Humans

With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: I will not be nothing.
-- Robin McKinley

#Self #Declaration

It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.
-- Robin McKinley

#Talking #People #Listening

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.
-- Robin McKinley

#Loss #Thinking #Sorrow

He didn't look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative.
-- Robin McKinley

#Insane #Looks #Uncooperative

He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.
-- Robin McKinley

#Kings #Men #Looks

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.
-- Robin McKinley

#Children #Stories #Differentiation

He grunted; she recognized it as relief that she wasn't going to nag him further about Tor the Just, who probably wasn't that boring if he could hold off the Notherners for nine days and melt a hole in the hills.
-- Robin McKinley

#Nine #Relief #Hills

And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket.
-- Robin McKinley

#Sea #Giving #Choices

It is a much more straightforward thing to be a dog, and a dog's love, once given, is not reconsidered.
-- Robin McKinley

#Dog #Given #Straightforward

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?' It doesn't, really...Somewhere where it all balances out-don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live?-if we could go there, you could see it doesn't.It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.
-- Robin McKinley

#Wall #Compassion #Names

But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.
-- Robin McKinley

#Trying #Stuff #Telling The Truth

He will apologize, or I'll give him a lesson in swordplay he will not like at all.
-- Robin McKinley

#Giving #Lessons #Apologizing

And none at all has ridden at the king's side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and flame, first taught men to forge their blades. You'd think Aerinha would have had better sense.
-- Robin McKinley

#Kings #Men #Thinking

She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did . . . It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minute.
-- Robin McKinley

#Hurt #Cutting #Blood

I almost wish I'd had the forethought to eat a tree myself.
-- Robin McKinley

#Tree #Wish #Forethought

We kings do develop a certain ability to recognize objects under our noses.
-- Robin McKinley

#Kings #Noses #Certain

If you wish, I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney.
-- Robin McKinley

#Cities #Together #Wish

My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.
-- Robin McKinley

#Zebras #Chocolate #Hot

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.
-- Robin McKinley

#Dream #Writing #Dragons

Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.
-- Robin McKinley

#Military #Thinking #Track

Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.
-- Robin McKinley

#Laughter #Stones #Sunlight

I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?
-- Robin McKinley

#Food #Anxiety #Potatoes

Vampire. Dangerous. Unknowable. Seriously creepy. This one's name was Constantine. We'd met before.
-- Robin McKinley

#Names #Creepy #Vampire

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.
-- Robin McKinley

#Good Luck #Medicine #Choices

One keeps searching for ease, she did not say, and not finding it, till the memories of no-pain seem only like daydreams.
-- Robin McKinley

#Pain #Memories #Ease

Roses are for love. Not silly sweet-hearts' love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life'll give you and that pours out of you when you're given the best instead.
-- Robin McKinley

#Sweet #Silly #Heart

[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous.
-- Robin McKinley

#True Friend #Dangerous

But the world turns, and even legends change; and somewhere there is a border, and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded its thorns may be.
-- Robin McKinley

#World #May #Legends

What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I'm sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark.
-- Robin McKinley

#Sorry #Dark #Space

So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them--and put them all over my apartment. Take a good long look at everyone I love.
-- Robin McKinley

#Eight #Cake #Two

She, too, spoke only when the queen or king addressed her first, but she looked searchingly at every supplicant, and her clear face said that she had opinions about everything she heard, and that it was her proud duty to think out those opinions, and make them responsible and coherent.
-- Robin McKinley

#Queens #Kings #Thinking

Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel; and not to fear what is strange, if you know it also to be true. —Luthe
-- Robin McKinley

#Two #World #Sides

What we can do, we must do: we must use what we are given, and we must use it the best we can, however much or little help we have for the task. What you have been given is a hard thing--a very hard thing... But my darling, what if there were no one who could do the difficult things?
-- Robin McKinley

#What If #Tasks #Use

There had been certain romantic interludes in the past that had included galloping across the desert at night; but he had never abducted any woman whose enthusiastic support for such a plan had not been secured well in advance.
-- Robin McKinley

#Past #Night #Support

Oh,' she said, too bone-weary to pretend: 'I would far rather that I love you as I saw yesterday I do than that I had gone on worshiping you as I did not long since.' And she turned away hastily, and did not see that Little John would reach out to her; and half-running, went to Tuck's cottage, where she could pull on her half-dry clothes, and become a proper outlaw again. At least, she thought, fighting back tears, like this I am Cecil, with a place among friends, and a task to do. I am someone. I wonder if perhaps if I am no longer Cecil, I am no one at all.
-- Robin McKinley

#Running #Love You #Fighting