“We don’t fall in love with perfect people. We fall in love with complex ones.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Know that you’re gonna screw up, and be OK with it, and do better next time.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Being a writer, writing for a living, is one long persistence game. Everyone wants you to quit. Quite often, you want to quit. You get kicked down. You come up swinging. You keep going. Either you are committed to it, or you aren’t.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I started writing books because I couldn’t find the books I wanted to read on the shelf.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I want to write books that keep people up at night, where they cry through the first forty pages and keep reading anyway.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Your enemies love your failures, sure. But what they love even more is to see you brought so low by those failures that you never get up again. Sometimes enemies aren’t even external. Often, our biggest critic, our greatest enemy, is ourselves.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Historically, science-fiction and fantasy literature is no stranger to controversy, but it has learned how to adapt and endure.”
― Kameron Hurley
“The reality is that much of the stuff you see in film, television, comics, and children’s cartoons got its start inside the inspired, disruptive halls of science-fiction and fantasy literature.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I’ve always been interested in the politics of war. War is one of those things that, the longer I studied it, the more illogical it seemed.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I started writing ‘God’s War’ knowing that I wanted to write about real people on a resource-strapped planet at perpetual war.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I can’t change the preconceived notions a reader brings to a work, but I can do my best to be aware of, address, and subvert tropes and expectations that readers may have as best I can and hope I don’t screw it up too much.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I think anger of any kind is valuable. It’s all about learning how to channel it. The worst thing we can do is get bored or complacent or worse – suppress our anger and then see it burst forth in unhealthy ways.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Short fiction isn’t my natural form. It’s taken a lot of work over the years to finally feel more comfortable writing stories under 80,000 words!”
― Kameron Hurley
“This is the biggest trick of the sort of thing I write: creating fun, powerful stories with tons of interesting stuff going socially and culturally that doesn’t overly confuse the reader.”
― Kameron Hurley
“As for the best ’80s action movie, I’m going to be predictable here and say ‘Die Hard.’ I watch that movie at least twice a year. Perfect script.”
― Kameron Hurley
“People interest me a lot: why we are kind, why we are cruel, how we learn the difference, what makes us act in ways contrary to those we’ve been socialized with.”
― Kameron Hurley
“It’s easier to say people are crazy than to try to figure out why.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Folks will always, always, always go back to the comfortable status quo, with its silent voices and lack of conflict, if you give them the chance.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Authors make stuff up. Let’s not pretend it’s any more magical than that.”
― Kameron Hurley
“What makes a book unique isn’t always about having one big grand new idea. It’s about combining many different ideas in new and interesting ways.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I’m the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I enjoy challenging myself in new and different ways.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I’m a naturally lazy person, and I live for a challenge.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I’ve told people before that I don’t want to be a part of a genre; I want to be my own genre. I want to create it.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I’m terribly particular about what I read: lush writing, secondary world or seriously far-out science fiction, strong worldbuilding, dynamic characters. I need to have it all for it to work for me.”
― Kameron Hurley
“One of the things I stress to those I meet, especially young people, is that we are the heroes of our own lives, and we can be the masters of our own stories.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Storytelling is a universal: every culture does it. There’s a reason our religious books aren’t simply a list of shall-and-shall-nots. Morals and teachings are contained in stories, which are studied, dissected, and passed down; we remember stories in a way we don’t remember lists of facts.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Science fiction writers create all sorts of futures – that comes with the job. But it’s not the type that matters – hopeful or dark – it’s the variety we see as readers. It’s nurturing the imaginations of those who will go on to create the world around us.”
― Kameron Hurley
“As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true – that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo – has not always been thus.”
― Kameron Hurley
“When we see sexist and racist behavior, the only way to change that is also to point it out and make it clear that it’s not okay.”
― Kameron Hurley
“There is no greater threat to progress than the phrase, ‘That’s impossible.’”
― Kameron Hurley
“I understand that space travel and expansion is just as much about altering ourselves, our attitudes, our social structures, our very biology, as it is about altering the places we choose to live.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Human beings thrive on imagination and pushing boundaries and limitations. Imposing limits when we don’t actually have any true idea of what’s possible is like imposing a steel trap over the mind.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Creating a future requires a profound and yes, unrealistic, vision of what is possible. But it is fantasy and wonder that drive technology and innovation.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I want to be constantly in awe of the possibilities of the universe.”
― Kameron Hurley
“’The Stars are Legion’ is part space opera, part thriller, about two warring families battling it out for control over a legion of organic starships.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Watching the progression and backlash against feminism even since 1970 will give you a serious case of whiplash.”
― Kameron Hurley
“What history taught me is that societies are not static and that the straight line of progressive ideals – this thinking we have that a society will just magically become more egalitarian over time – is patently false.”
― Kameron Hurley
“If your entire conception of what’s possible in fantasy only comes from other fantasy books, you’re going to go on to create a copy of a copy of a copy. There’s nothing original there, nothing dynamic. Which is fine if that’s your goal, but I’ve always wanted to do something no one else was doing before.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I don’t like to write about things that bore me, and that means I steer far clear of writing books that are just like what’s on the shelves.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Authors are often sent a number of books to read for possible review and advance praise. It can be easy for new books to get lost in the pile.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Once readers and industry professionals have you pegged down as writing a particular type of book, they are less likely to try something new from you if they decided they didn’t like the first one.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Pen names have always fascinated me, in part because I understand the professional and economic and even societal reasons to do so.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I tried to be really nice and like the things other people liked and do the things other people were supposed to do, and what you find out is that they’re going to bully you anyway. And I thought, ‘You know what? If I’m going to get bullied anyway, I might as well get bullied for making a difference in the world.’”
― Kameron Hurley
“I think that there’s this idea – especially for male readers, but female readers as well, because we’re all indoctrinated, right? – where there’s this idea that if a woman is tough, it can only be in a way that is still sexy.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Novel writing, like so many things in life, is an iterative process. You come at it again and again, working at it like you would a piece of pottery or a stone sculpture, chipping away the parts that don’t make sense, smoothing over the rough edges.”
― Kameron Hurley
“There are no failed ideas, just ideas that haven’t found their moment yet.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Many people don’t even want to start something until they feel fairly confident that they will be a success at it. But me? I love to throw myself into things headfirst and fail all over the place.”
― Kameron Hurley
“As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I used to love writing bleak, grimdark futures full of bleak, grimdark people. But I’ve found that as the world around me darkens, all I really want to do is grasp for more light.”
― Kameron Hurley
“When I was a kid, I watched a lot of ‘Twilight Zone.’ My mother was obsessed with the show, as it was a staple of her childhood – and thus she made it one of ours, too.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Writers of all things speculative have played in alternate and parallel worlds for a long time – everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee – and it’s an obsession that likely isn’t going away any time soon.”
― Kameron Hurley
“While many alternate reality stories ask, ‘What might have been?’ parallel universe stories literalize the war between good and evil that plays inside each of us every day. It’s what makes this type of story so perfect for many fantasy tales: we’re all just a coin flip away from being entirely different people.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I know a lot of writers who tell me they ‘always’ knew how to read. They can’t remember a time before reading. And those writers make me want to tear my hair out.”
― Kameron Hurley
“My parents both worked full-time flipping burgers at the local fast-food joint, and my grandmother looked after us. English was her second language, so instead of books, I learned spoken French nursery rhymes and curse words.”
― Kameron Hurley
“What I found so captivating about the idea of being a writer was having the ability to write down all these things I made up in my head so other people could see them.”
― Kameron Hurley
“As an introverted kid who lived in the middle of nowhere, my stories made up the whole of my social life. That meant that while other kids cultivated hobbies like skateboarding or playing the piano, I sat at home scribbling in notebooks.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Before I wrote ‘God’s War,’ I probably did eight years of research into the Middle East, Judaism, Islam, Catholicisim, and all sorts of fabulous other things.”
― Kameron Hurley
“Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I write for free online out of love, passion, and often, rage.”
― Kameron Hurley
“I’m incredibly pleased to be working with Marco Palmieri and Tor Books on ‘The Geek Feminist Revolution.’ This was an exciting book to pitch and is proving to be a lot of fun to put together.”
― Kameron Hurley
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