Ransom Riggs Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

My portal to another world was fiction.

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.

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

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'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

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!

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!

Some of my favorite photos from the old days are of people who maybe didn't know how to smile. Maybe smiling in photos wasn't an accepted form of behavior back then. But the big eyes and the oversized dolls that people are carrying, and it's something about their hair - the anachronisms of these photos are really what creep me out.

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.

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.