Kelly Link Quotes & Sayings

Meeting writers is usually disappointing, at best. Writers who write sexy thrillers aren't necessarily sexy or thrilling in person. Children's book writers might look more like accountants, or axe murderers for that matter. Horror writers are very rarely scary looking, although they are frequently good cooks. — Kelly Link

Marriage has affected the laws of gravity. We will now revolve around each other. You will exert gravity on me, and I will exert gravity on you. We are one another's moons. You are holding onto my feet with both hands, as if otherwise you might fall right off the bed. I think I might float up and hit the ceiling, splat, if you let go. Please don't let go. — Kelly Link

Becka might have been average in L.A., but average in L.A. is Queen of Mars in the visiting room of a federal penitentiary in North Carolina. — Kelly Link

Her voice is furry and sharp, like a blanket made of needles. — Kelly Link

God has an inordinate fondness for stars and also for beetles. The small and the very far away. — Kelly Link

Jeremy is an optimist. Maybe there's something good on TV. He settles down with the remote control on one of his father's pet couches: oversized and reupholstered in an orange-juice-colored corduroy that makes it appear as if the couch has just escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture. This couch looks like it's hobby is devouring interior decorators. Jeremy's father is a horror writer, so no one should be surprised if some of the couches he reupholsters are hideous and eldritch. — Kelly Link

When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day. — Kelly Link

It worked because I asked justly. Magic makes judgments. Remember that. — Kelly Link

Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes. — Kelly Link

A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else. — Kelly Link

The boy is loved. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it? — Kelly Link

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. — Kelly Link

Yes, well." The Devil says, "Things just get better and better nowadays. — Kelly Link

who wanted to see a monster, even if it meant that you got to tell everyone about it? — Kelly Link

When you do for other people (Fran's daddy said once upon a time when he was drunk, before he got religion) things that they could do for themselves, but they pay you to do it instead, you both will get used to it. — Kelly Link

Remember, when you don't know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It's like reading the I Ching or tea leaves. — Kelly Link

perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustache that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn't ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When — Kelly Link

When you're Dead ... you stay up all night long. — Kelly Link

When Carleton was three
months old, Henry had realized that they'd misunderstood something.
Babies weren't babies - they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests. They
were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely a listening
for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky,
sticky manifestation of not-sleep. Once Henry had stood and watched
Carleton in his crib, sleeping peacefully. He had not done what he wanted
to do. He had not bent over and yelled in Carleton's ear. Henry still hadn't
forgiven Carleton, not yet, not entirely, not for making him feel that way. — Kelly Link

What I like about narrative in general is when there is some incongruity between the form and content. Let's say, mixing up the gothic with a coming-of-age narrative. Telling a love story that's also a monster story. Mixing up superhero tropes with your monster tropes. I like category confusion. — Kelly Link

She knows, every part of her knows, that she wants to kiss him. That he wants to kiss her. All of her skin prickles with longing. Her insides fizz. (The Lady and the Fox) — Kelly Link

I'm not good at the friends thing. I'm the human equivalent of one of those baby birds that fall out of a nest and then some nice person picks the baby bird up and puts it back. Except that now the baby bird smells all wrong. I think I smell wrong. — Kelly Link

The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?
Here endeth the lesson. — Kelly Link

Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he's never been there. He knows some girls, and yet he doesn't know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted. — Kelly Link

Only a few of the women sport pubic hair. He's never understood what that's about. Some of the men are bare, too. O tempora, o mores. — Kelly Link

What Batu thought Eric should say to Charley, if he really liked her: "Come live with me. Come live at the All-Night."
What Eric thought about saying to Charley: "If you're going away, take me with you. I'm about to be twenty years old, and I've never been to college. I sleep days in a storage closet, wearing someone else's pajamas. I've worked retail jobs since I was sixteen. I know people are hateful. If you need to bite someone, you can bite me. — Kelly Link

Do you have a zombie contingency plan? — Kelly Link

She put her feet down gently. The whole world was made of glass, and the glass was full of champagne, and Bunnatine was a bubble, just flicking up and up and up. — Kelly Link

We are sitting on our honeymoon bed in the honeymoon suite. We are in a state of honeymoon, in our honey month. These words are so sweet: honey, moon. This bed is so big, we could live on it. We have been happily marooned
honey marooned
on this bed for days. — Kelly Link

On old maps, cartographers would draw strange beasts around the margins and write phrases such as "Here be dragons." That's where monsters exist: in the unmapped spaces, in the places where we haven't filled in all the gaps ... — Kelly Link

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness. — Kelly Link

She's wearing a T-shirt that says I'M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES. "Hey, — Kelly Link

I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed. — Kelly Link

She said, So my question is this. Does Angel the vampire keep a pair of black leather pants in his closet? Just in case? Like fat pants? Do vampires have closets? Or does he donate his evil pants to Goodwill when he's good again? Because if so then every time he turns evil, he has to go buy new evil pants. — Kelly Link

It's very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? If you find out, please tell me. — Kelly Link

Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet. — Kelly Link

Dragons eat the things that they're curious about. — Kelly Link

What happens when you get to the end of the world? Sometimes you find a party. This party has been going on for a long time. There is music, lights, people drinking and dancing. Strange things happen at these parties. It is the end of the world, after all. — Kelly Link

A vampire is a flexible metaphor. You know, death, sex, change, stagnation, loss of self, loss of agency, having to keep one's real self secret, the possibility of something lasting forever: love, hate, grief. — Kelly Link

Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a character on a television show called The Library. You've never seen the Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had. — Kelly Link

She shone like a bright strange star shining in those empty lifeless halls, I write. — Kelly Link

When one cannot afford a scandal, a blackmailer is an excellent bargain. — Kelly Link

Hildy has resigned herself to this, that life is a series of sudden disappearences, leavetakings without the proper good-byes. Someday she too might vanish. Some days she looks forward to learning this trick. — Kelly Link

I built a cannon out of ice, and wrapped myself in the funeral carpet which my husbands and wives had woven for me out of their own hair, and one of my wives was my gunner. I came back here, after many adventures, and once, when I'd been drinking, donated the funeral carpet to the national museum. When I was sober again, I asked for it back, but they claimed not to know what I was talking about. — Kelly Link

There are stories about winter ghosts found tangles like lice in their lovers' hair. — Kelly Link

Our eyes are always blind when they view the future. — Kelly Link

It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels. — Kelly Link

I don't abandon stories once I've started working on them. Once I sit down and start a story, I'll be damned if I'm going to give up on it. But I do reject most of the ideas for stories that I come up with. — Kelly Link

There was a difference between art, which you just looked at, and things like soap, which you used. Even if the soap smelled so good that you didn't want to use it, only smell it. This was why people got so pissed off about art. Because you didn't eat it, and you didn't sleep on it, and you couldn't put it up your nose. A lot of people said things like "That's not art" when whatever they were talking about could clearly not have been anything else, except art. — Kelly Link

The witch knew who had killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from the business of dying, to make her revenge. — Kelly Link

Whether or not [a] story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape. — Kelly Link

The initial spark usually has something to do with panic
I'm due to turn in a story to a workshop or an editor. It's a terrible working method. — Kelly Link

Sometimes a friendship is more like a war. — Kelly Link

You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place. — Kelly Link

There's a reason why movie theatres don't encourage people to bring their goats. — Kelly Link

Jake's hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after all the ice has melted. — Kelly Link

Most of My Friends are two-thirds water — Kelly Link

Everybody naked, nobody happy. It's Scandinavian art porn. — Kelly Link

She'll take what she can get and be happy about it, because love isn't about convenience and frozen yogurt and real life. That isn't what love is about. — Kelly Link

I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. I'm a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I watch Buffy reruns. I don't believe in that kind of shit. — Kelly Link

Look. All books are weird when you think about it ... It goes without saying that real life is also weird. — Kelly Link

The world is a dangerous place, full of people who don't trust each other. This is why I am staying up in this tree. — Kelly Link

And then there's the Face. Who is a nobody, a real person, who comes and takes your place at the table. They get an education, the best health care, a salary, all the nice clothes and all the same toys that you get. They get your parents whenever the Olds' team decides there's a need or an opportunity. If you go online, or turn on the TV, there they are, being you. Being better than you will ever be at being you. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you have to be careful, or you'll start to feel very strange. Is that really you? — Kelly Link

Her chest feels very tight, as if she's suddenly full of poison. You have to keep it all inside. Like throwing yourself on a bomb to save everyone else. Except you're the bomb. — Kelly Link

The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed and given to evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works too much, or it can be an alarm clock. — Kelly Link

Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. — Kelly Link

I helped Master Crawford, the watchmaker, now that his sight had gone and faded to a thin pinpoint of light. That were my favorite time. I loved the beauty of all them parts working perfectly together, a little world that could be put to rights with the click of gears, like time itself answered to your fingers. There is a beauty to the way things work. Remove one part, add another, you've changed the mechanism — Kelly Link

Except you can't judge a book by its cover. Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape. The two sisters are waiting for the moon to come up, which is not the same thing as waiting for the sun to go down. Not at all. — Kelly Link

You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give up on him yet. — Kelly Link

Well, I don't ever leave out details, in that I don't come up with information or description which I don't then use. I only ever come up with what seems to me absolutely essential to make the story work. I'm not usually an overwriter. As I revise, it's usually a matter of adding in as much vivid details as seem necessary to make the story come clear without slowing down the momentum of the story. — Kelly Link

How could I love you? How could I love a ghost? How could I love something that I have to keep hidden in my pocket? — Kelly Link

I didn't do anything as active as deciding that I wanted to be a writer. For one thing, I didn't feel like I was the final authority on whether or not I was anything like a writer. (I'm a timid soul.) I just kept writing stories, because becoming a veterinarian seemed as if it involved too much dissection. — Kelly Link

The Wizard of Oz was a humbug. He's not great and powerful. He just pretends to be great and powerful. The Wicked Witch of the West is greater and powerfuller. She's got flying monkeys. She's like a mad scientist. She even has a secret weakness. Water is like Kryptonite to her. — Kelly Link

I have things to not do, and not a lot of time to not do them in. — Kelly Link

Becka was almost good looking enough to be on a reality dating show, but not funny looking or sad enough to be on one of the makeover shows. — Kelly Link

Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire. — Kelly Link

The Customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an asshole. That's the first rule of retail. — Kelly Link

Most of the things that I remember from childhood wouldn't make a particularly good story: rescuing worms during rainstorms, our schnauzer attacking a wheel of cheese when someone dropped it during dinner, my parents tricking us into riding Space Mountain at Disney World (we thought it was an educational people-mover kind of ride), playing Star Wars (I got to marry Harrison Ford and my sister married Luke Skywalker) in first and second grade. On the other hand, we always had lots of interesting babysitters
seminary students and friends of my parents
who told really good ghost stories. — Kelly Link

No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings. — Kelly Link

I've gotten a little superstitious about listening to music when I write. Once a story is going somewhere, I keep listening to the same music whenever I work on that story. It seems to help me keep in voice, and alternatively, if I need to make some kind of dramatic shift, I'll go and put on something different to shake myself awake. — Kelly Link

You should never poison a witch. — Kelly Link

You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again. — Kelly Link

I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work. — Kelly Link

Do you know how, sometimes, during a commercial break in your favorite television shows, your best friend calls and wants to talk about one of her boyfriends, and when you try to hang up, she starts crying and you try to cheer her up and end up missing about half o the episode? And so when you go to work the next day you have to get the guy who sits next to you to explain what happened? That's the good thing about a book. You can mark your place in a book. But this isn't really a book. It's a television show. — Kelly Link

Jeremy and Karl and Elizabeth have known each other since the first day of kindergarten. Amy and Talis are a year younger ... Now the five are inseparable; invincible. They imagine that life will always be like this
like a television show in eternal syndication
that they will always have each other. They use the same vocabulary. They borrow each other's books and music. They share lunches, and they never say anything when Jeremy comes over and takes a shower. They all know Jeremy's father is eccentric. He's supposed to be eccentric. He's a novelist. — Kelly Link

I'm grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It's harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I've lost perspective. Mostly I'm just glad that I can be done with them. — Kelly Link

Wizards are always hungry. — Kelly Link

I'd be flattered if someone said that my work is "too weird" for them. I value the uncompliment. — Kelly Link

Picture the lobby of a hotel. [ ... ] Now fill up the lobby with dentists and superheroes. Men and women, oral surgeons, eighth-dimensional entities, mutants, and freaks who want to save your teeth, save the world, and maybe end up with a television show, too. [ ... ] Boards in the lobby list panels on advances in cosmetic dentistry, effective strategies for minimizing liability in cases of bystander hazard, presentations with titles like Spandex or Bulletproof? What Look Is Right For You? — Kelly Link

Babies weren't babies - they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests. They were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep. — Kelly Link

I would like to write a novel, or at least try to write one, although my motives are not entirely pure. For one thing, I get asked about writing novels so much that I feel guilty about never having written one. And although I have no strong desire to write a novel, I would hate not to try. That would just be silly. On the other hand, I hate the idea of slogging through something that turns out to be not good. — Kelly Link

The face, the whole body, the way you moved in it, just a guise. You put it on, you put it off again. What was underneath belonged to you, just you, as long as you kept it hidden. — Kelly Link

Because love isn't just love. It's all the other stuff, too. — Kelly Link

If you were to say a witch's chess set instead of a witch's family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well. — Kelly Link

We're reminders that people shouldn't feel too smug. That what you think you own, you don't. That life can change just like that." Fadwa snapped her fingers. — Kelly Link

A girl from Pittsburgh was a good thing, like an anchor. Every homesick traveler should have one. — Kelly Link

I want (the story) to be about good and evil and true love, and it should also be funny. No talking animals. Not too much fooling around with the narrative structure. The ending should be happy but still realistic, believable, you know, and there shouldn't be a moral although we should be able to think back later and have some sort of revelation. No 'and suddenly they woke up and discovered that it was all a dream.' Got that? — Kelly Link

Tell me which you could sooner do without, love or water."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, could you live without love, or could you live without water?"
"Why can't I have both? — Kelly Link

Nobody tells her to shut up. It would be pointless. Amy has a large heart and an even larger mouth. When it rains, Amy rescues worms off the sidewalk. When you get tired of having a secret, you tell Amy.
Understand: Amy isn't that much stupider than anyone else in the story. It's just that she thinks out loud. — Kelly Link

Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness. — Kelly Link