Quotes by Greg van Eekhout

About Greg van Eekhout:

Greg van Eekhout is a science fiction and fantasy writer. His "In the Late December" (2003) was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and his middle-grade fantasy novel The Boy at the End of the World was nominated for the 2012 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

To act as though we have hope is to keep hope alive

Greg van Eekhout

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

I grew up in Los Angeles, and I was always fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits. Right in the middle of the city, in an area called the Miracle Mile, for crying out loud, we have these eldritch ponds of dark, bubbling goo. And down in the muck, there'r...

Greg van Eekhout

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 passio...

Greg van Eekhout

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

Greg van Eekhout

Back in 1982, when there were still only a manageable number of 'X-Men' titles on the racks (by which I mean just one), Marvel quite reasonably figured the world could stand another team of beleaguered mutant superheroes. And so were born 'The New Mu...

Greg van Eekhout

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

Greg van Eekhout

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

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'...

Greg van Eekhout

It's possible I'm a weird person, you know, and if I could only write for people who are like me, I wouldn't have any audience at all. Ultimately, I'm my audience. I'm writing stories for myself. I don't have kids of my own, and I don't hang around k...

Greg van Eekhout

At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, thro...

Greg van Eekhout

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 heis...

Greg van Eekhout

'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

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

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

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

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

Greg van Eekhout

If 'Star Wars' wasn't enough to prepare me for a dark future, there was the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise, conveniently repeated for me in Los Angeles on KABC's Channel Seven 3:30 movie. Apes enslaving humans! Mutants with boils and an atom bomb! Ap...

Greg van Eekhout

As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a d...

Greg van Eekhout

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

Author Bio

  • NameGreg van Eekhout
  • Descriptionspeculative fiction writer
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist