Best 73 quotes of Naomi Novik on MyQuotes

All of a sudden, I sort of started to feel that I was constrained by the characters as opposed to enjoying them. And that remains for me to this day the line that I know where it's like, OK, you're not writing fan fiction anymore.

As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake - all the cake - and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.

Enough of that, you damned conspirators, you will have us hanged a great deal sooner than we will.

I am very tired of this Government, which I have never seen, and which is always insisting that I must do disagreeable things, and does no good to anybody.

I do not care if they do not like me," he said. "Maybe then they will let me alone, and I will not have to stay in China." The thought visibly struck him, and his head came up with sudden enthusiasm. "If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now?" he asked. "Laurence, what would be particularly insulting" Hammond looked like Pandora, the box open and horrors loose upon the world. Laurence was inclined to laugh, but he stifled it out of sympathy.

I do not think you are in any danger of starving," Maximus said. "The surgeon said only two weeks ago that you are too fat." "The devil!" Berkley said indignantly, sitting up; and Maximus snorted in amusement at having provoked him.

I ended up rooming in a dorm that was basically a solid wall of female scientists. And every Wednesday, we would all watch "Star Trek: Next Generation.

I'm an engineer and a writer. And I find that those two things are not uncomplementary.

I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on.

It seems to me after a fellow has been mutinied against three or four times, there is something to it besides bad luck.

It seems to me that if you wish to apply laws to us, it were only reasonable to consult us on them, and from what you have read to me about Parliament, I do not think any dragons are invited to go there

I will see you bereft of all that you have, of home and happiness and beautiful things. I will see your nation cast down and your allies drawn away. I will see you as alone and friendless and wretched as am I; and then you may live as long as you like, in some dark and lonely corner of the earth, and I shall call myself content. -Lien, Albino Celestial (Dragon)

I will tell you what we shall do: if ever you need to rescue Catherine, or you Berkley, Maximus, I will help you, and you will do as much for me. Then we do not need to worry, I do not suppose anyone could stop all three of us, at least not before we can escape

Justice is expensive. That is why there is so little of it, and it is reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.

Next you will cry about taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbor. You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility

Something about that whole process of building the structure of that game turned into a real kind of lightbulb moment for me as a writer.

Temeraire-- Never fear; I am going; the Son of Heaven will not tolerate delays, and Barham gives me leave. Allegiance will carry us! Pray eat something --L.

Temeraire said, 'It is very nice how many books there are, indeed. And on so many subjects!

The gate is perfectly simple," Temeraire said. "There is only a bar across the fence, which one can lift very easily, and then it swings open; Nitidus could do it best, for his forehands are the smallest. Though it is difficult to keep the animals inside the pen, and the first time I learned how to open it, they all ran away," he added. "Maximus and I had to chase after them for hours and hours--it was not funny at all," he said, ruffled, sitting back on his haunches and contemplating Laurence with great indignation.

The Magicians brilliantly explores the hidden underbelly of fantasy and easy magic, taking what’s simple on the surface and turning it over to show us the complicated writhing mess beneath. It’s like seeing the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter through a 3-D magnifying glass.

The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.

Trying to out-guess Bonaparte; the thought makes my blood run cold.

Well, I would have struck him, but I would have had to get up. You have no notion how difficult it is to arrange skirts when sitting down; it took me five minutes together the first time.

What could make the Napoleonic Wars more exciting? Dragons.

Would you believe it's harder to find a virgin than a unicorn in New York?

You can actually muck with history and think about what if, why not. What if there were dragons in the Incan Empire that allowed them to resist colonization? What if there were a massive dragon empire in the middle of the interior of southern Africa that decided to take objection to the slave trade?

All maps are fiction when the world is seen from the sky. But if ten thousand dragons choose to believe in this one, I think you will find it nearer truth than otherwise.

. . . and it came out that this King Arthur and his knights had done nothing of real note but to kill innocent dragons all around Britain: almost certainly a pack of lies, as Forthing admitted they had not possessed even any guns at the time, and unpleasant lies at that.

And we must still try or we would be leaving our friends to fight without us. I think this is what you have meant by duty, all along; I do understand, at least this much of it.

And yet Praecursoris is not punished the same way, only because it is not practical, and he is needed for breeding?

Araminta had generally considered the laws of etiquette as the rules of the chase, and divided them into categories: those which everyone broke, all the time; those which one could not break without being frowned at; and those which caused one to be quietly and permanently left out of every future invitation to the field.

Because my demon told me to” isn’t a generally accepted reason,

But none of that matters at all.” His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, “It’s just—a way to go. There isn’t only one way to go.” I waved at his notes. “You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like—it’s gleaning in the woods,” I said abruptly. “You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time.

But she hadn't been able to take root. She'd remembered the wrong things, and forgotten too much. She'd remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she'd forgotten how to grow.

But the world I wanted wasn’t the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at one, I would do nothing forever.

Elsie eyed him puzzledly, and then offered, "Would you like to see my plate?

Fear and work weren't all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn't see my mother and father for ten years, that I'd never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon's girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn't recognize at the end of it.

Four years! My heart was glad as birds.

He is mine, too.

I am of the opinion", Tharkay said, "that you ought not assign to free will something more likely the consequence of a sharp blow to the skull.

I did not really need Magretta to tell me that love had caught my father like an unwilling fish, and having slipped the hook he had been glad to forget he had ever been on it in the first place.

I didn't properly think about what was happening even as I kissed him back, my laughter spilling into his mouth and making stutters of my kisses. I was still bound up with him, our magic snarled up into great messy tangled knots. I didn't have anything to compare that intimacy to. I'd felt the hot embarrassment of it, but I'd thought of it vaguely like being naked in front of a stranger. I hadn't connected it to sex—sex was poetic references in songs, my mother's practical instructions, and those few awful hideous moments in the tower with Prince Marek, where I might as well have been a rag doll as far as he'd cared. But now I toppled the Dragon over, clutching at his shoulders. As we fell his thigh pressed between mine, through my skirts, and in one shuddering jolt I began to form a startled new understanding.

I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot.

I don't want more sense!" I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. "Not if sense means I'll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that's worth holding on to?

If Napoleon can seek to ascend all the thrones of Europe, I suppose we may go dragging them out from under him

If they cannot be woken to a natural affection for their country, such as we feel, it is our fault and not theirs.

If you will pardon my saying so," Tharkay said, "you will never satisfy them on that point: the last thing you or Temeraire will ever give anyone is quiet obedience. Have you considered it might be better not to try?

I grabbed back at him just as incautiously with my hand and my magic both, even as he pressed magic on me from his side as well. His breath huffed out sharply, and our workings caught on one another, magic gushing into them.

I knew myself for the first time in a week, standing on earth instead of polished marble.

I know i'm making her sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her. And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon.