Top 33 Ransom Riggs Quotes

I love building out the worlds of my fiction with fictional books.

I write the books to amuse myself.

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

My happy place is 40 feet out in the Gulf of Mexico, sitting on a sandbar in 80-degree water, watching clouds crawl by. Absolute heaven.

Los Angeles, which is where I live, happens to be a great place for junk. People have a lot of it, and they sell it and trade it: At these big swap meets, many, many hundreds of dealers of junk will descend upon a football field on a Saturday and sell all their stuff.

I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.

Just keep saying yes to everything – until you can afford to say no.

Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through – or why complete strangers would want them.

I’ve always been interested in exploration and the history of exploring the world, but it seems like we’ve found everything now.

Just the textures of things are really important to me as I’m writing; I think atmospherics and visuals can have such emotional impact if you can harness the thematic thread between how scenes look and how your characters feel. I like to tug on that thread.

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.

I think ‘Hollow City’ only took a year and a half to write… but it felt like two and a half!

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.

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.

Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

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 have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don’t know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.

Creepy is better than just plain scary because you can’t look away from creepy – you want to know the truth!

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.

‘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.

You’ll find a lot of rich detail in people’s personal histories – diaries and journals and things of the era.

For a 12-year-old with a hyperactive imagination who liked to dream of dreary gothic castles, suburban Florida felt a little stifling.

When you’re looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing on it.

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.

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

It was at a big swap meet that I discovered you could buy other people’s old discarded family photos and vacation pictures for pretty cheap – a quarter, 50 cents, five bucks for a really nice one.

I happen to collect the weird stuff – photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

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.

Teenagers are extremely smart, and if they think for even a second that an author is ‘writing down’ to them, or mimicking their voice poorly, or condescending to them in any way, they will throw the book across the room.

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

I grew up in Florida, which is the land of flea markets and swap meets. My grandmother loved to go these places, and she’d take me along.

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.

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