Ransom Riggs

“I didn’t know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it. It felt silly and fragile and good.”

“As writers, we have to make our own work - as bloggers, writing for video games, whatever we can do. Everyone breaks into the business in a different way.”

“I try to imagine the scenes as I'm writing them as if I were watching them play like a film.”

“Though I imagine we're killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that'll seem insane to people in the future. And as doors to the next world go, a bog ain't a bad choice. It's not quite water and it's not quite land - it's an in-between place.”

“I had some great English teachers. One of my favorite - her name was Linda Janoff - was wonderful and so irreverent and so smart and encouraging.”

“To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.”

“Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.”

“An air of mystery closed around the details of his early life. I didn't pry. He had been through hell and had a right to his secrets.”

“It's easy to say you don't care about money when you have plenty of it.”

“The undiscovered places that are interesting to me are these places that contain bits of our disappearing history, like a ghost town.”

“Is anything illegal here?' Addison asked.'Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that's just for paperbacks.'There's a library?''Two. Though one won't lend because all the books are bound in human skin and quite valuable.”

“I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!”

“But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around--they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.”

“You Sure this is it?" I said. "It looks empty.""Empty? No way, there's loads of shit in there," worm replied”

“I don't want to ever write a book that seems like it's pandering to younger people or talking down to people who I know are very smart.”

“I'd never asked what year it was here-1492? 1750?-though to the animals I guess it hardly mattered. This was a safe place apart from the world of people, and only in the world of people did the year make any difference.”

“What I believe is that when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You are here for a reason -- and it's not to fail and die.”

“She had maintained her strength in the face of all this for so long that we had come to take it for granted, but she wasn't bulletproof. She might've been peculiar but she was also human,”

“My creativity thrives with limitations.”

“When you collect photographs, you're sort of at the mercy of the gods.”