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If you must fail ... fail spectacularly!
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
I've been interested in photography and have been taking pictures ever since I got a little 35mm camera for Christmas in the seventh grade. In college I took some photography classes and learned how to develop and print film in a darkroom, which you don't technically need to do anymore, thanks to digital technology and photoshop and whatnot, but which I found totally fascinating and really useful. I'm still an amateur, really, but it's something I love to do.
RANSOM RIGGS, I Like These Books interview, Jul. 6, 2011
What an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
You can get sick of anything if you have too much of it.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Just realizing that they were out there to be bought and owned -- other people's old pictures. It seemed like an awfully strange thing to collect at first, until I started finding pictures that really piqued my interest. Now it seems like the most natural thing in the world (but it's OK if you still think I'm weird). Choosing a favorite find is really difficult, but there's one I love, of a young teen girl wearing old west clothes, a knife in her belt, holding a shotgun over one shoulder. She's looking off to one side with this odd, shifty expression, as if she's expecting someone to come in and catch her wearing men's clothing any second now. Very strange and evocative.
RANSOM RIGGS, Bookrat interview, Oct. 16, 2011
I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better.
RANSOM RIGGS, Hollow City
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.
RANSOM RIGGS, Hollow City
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.
RANSOM RIGGS, interview, Fine Books & Collections Magazine, 2014
I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
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!
RANSOM RIGGS, interview, The Hub, Oct. 22, 2012
What I believe is that when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents.... You are here for a reason -- and it's not to fail and die.
RANSOM RIGGS, Hollow City
Sometimes it's better not to look back.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
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.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.
RANSOM RIGGS, Hollow City
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!
RANSOM RIGGS, interview, Fine Books & Collections Magazine, 2014
I did love her, of course, but mostly because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I'd like very much if I met her walking down the street.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid and wish you'd just stayed in bed?
RANSOM RIGGS, Hollow City
It was a little daunting, primarily because the first book was so open-ended. Before I came around to its current story, I tried a few different things with Hollow City that didn’t quite work, mostly involving taking the children far and wide around the world, because I badly wanted to explore this world I’d created (but had only seen one tiny corner of; one loop, one gang of peculiar children). Eventually I realized that, because I was writing a time travel story, I didn’t have to send the children on a globe-trotting quest in order to explore their world, I just needed to send them to a place that had a lot of juicy history. Then the answer was obvious: London! And they already had their central problem when the first book comes to a close, which is that their protectress is stuck in bird form and could be in mortal danger. So, once I settled on London as their goal, the rest fell into place pretty quickly.
RANSOM RIGGS, Barnes & Noble interview, Feb. 20, 2014
Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.
RANSOM RIGGS, Library of Souls
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.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those 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 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.
RANSOM RIGGS, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
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