Quotes from Ransom Riggs

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

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

I just can't fathom this fame thing; I'm a total newbie.

'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.

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.

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.

'The Tales' are an important part of 'Hollow City,' when the kids discover secrets encoded in them that end up saving their lives. I wrote two tales as part of 'Hollow City,' and spent the next couple of years finishing the trilogy but itching to write more tales.

I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously.

John Bellairs's young adult mysteries were great - and super creepy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I wanted to create characters who could do fantastic things but who weren't exactly superheros - characters who exist on sort of a spectrum from super-ability to disability.

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

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

The end of 'Hollow City' left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that's just where 'Library of Souls' begins.

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

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 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.

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.

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