Greg van Eekhout Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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're all these amazing fossils: mammoth and saber tooth cat and dire wolf.”

“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.”

“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! Ape riots in Century City! They killed baby Caesar's parents!”

“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 heist, motivated by justice and hunger.”

“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 kids all that much. Maybe that puts me at a disadvantage.”

“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 passions - art, music, sports, what have you.”

“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's at stake is the survival of the human species.”

“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.”