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. – Ransom Riggs
I try to imagine the scenes as I’m writing them as if I were watching them play like a film. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
You’ll find a lot of rich detail in people’s personal histories – diaries and journals and things of the era. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material. – Ransom Riggs
Creepy is better than just plain scary because you can’t look away from creepy – you want to know the truth! – Ransom Riggs
You find a lot of junk when you’re searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you’ll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you’re certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you’re hooked for life. – Ransom Riggs
The end of ‘Hollow City’ left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that’s just where ‘Library of Souls’ begins. – Ransom Riggs
‘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. – Ransom Riggs
Woodcuts have a really timeless sort of feel, and they feel like a book that’s a couple hundred years old. – Ransom Riggs
I think ‘Hollow City’ only took a year and a half to write… but it felt like two and a half! – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
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. – Ransom Riggs
The undiscovered places that are interesting to me are these places that contain bits of our disappearing history, like a ghost town. – Ransom Riggs
