Ransom Riggs

My portal to another world was fiction.

I just like that balance of the real and the fantastical because as a reader and consumer of stories and fantasy, I always want to feel like I can find that world.

Fifty-percent of the director\'s job honestly is casting the movie well.

When you\'re writing, at least when I\'m writing, I don\'t think about themes and I try not to sermonize with any particular message.

So one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

If you are a conscious human being who has opinions about the world, then you will unconsciously put your own perspective into the book.

Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid and wish you\'d just stayed in bed?

Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn\'t mean I don\'t map them out ? I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft!

If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

I own a few thousand snapshots, which is small by the standards of most collectors I know. I generally only buy photos I think I may actually be able to use in a book one day. I need that focus when buying, because without it I\'d just buy everything and my house would be overrun with bucket loads of snapshots; there are just too many beautiful images in the world, and I\'d need to own them all.

I\'ve never really been interested in the vintage photos people pay lots of money for -- civil war tintypes or old daguerrotypes of famous people. Nor do I have any interest in the really gross, dark stuff that some people pay top-dollar, like post-mortem photos of babies (yuck) or press photos of old murder scenes or whatever. I collect in these little niches most other people don\'t care about -- dark-and-weird-but-fun -- and photos that have been written on, which a lot of sellers think hurts their value. All of which is good news for me!

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of these ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries - but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.

I had been writing since I was pretty small, and I\'ve always been telling these stories about doors and finding other worlds within our own.

Your tribe is out there, you just have to find them.

There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret. Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

If I\'d kept my heart better armored, where would I be now?

My creativity thrives with limitations.

We kind of know there\'s no more frontiers in the physical world. So the frontiers move from where we haven\'t been yet to where we\'ve been and abandoned.

I had always secretly wanted to write a novel.

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 loved the idea of a book of fairytales meant especially for peculiar children, and I love even more the idea of making that fictional book real.

I was in the same class of 100 kids from grade 6 through 12, many of whom I still call friends.

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

\'Library of Souls\' is longer than \'Hollow City\' by a considerable margin, but this time I was on the right track from the beginning, so I never had to start over. It took about 15 months, all told.

I didn\'t know who I was writing for initially. I assumed \'Miss Peregrine\' was for adults, because I was an adult - but I didn\'t know much about publishing back then.

It was painful, but I really wanted to get \'Hollow City\' right, and I\'m glad I put in the time because I\'m really proud of it.

In \'Hollow City,\' I\'m taking all the characters out of the lives they\'ve been secure in for years and plunging them into the unknown. That\'s how you really get to know them.

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

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those \'Choose Your Own Adventure\' books.

I\'d always wanted to write a novel, but after attending film school, I\'d spent five years knocking on Hollywood\'s door and had put that idea aside.