I write the books to amuse myself.

My creativity thrives with limitations.

Sometimes it's better not to look back.

My portal to another world was fiction.

If you must fail ... fail spectacularly!

Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.

I had always secretly wanted to write a novel.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

Your tribe is out there, you just have to find them.

I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.

I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

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

Our debt was too great and the words thank you too small.

If I'd kept my heart better armored, where would I be now?

When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.

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

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

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

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

It's easy to say you don't care about money when you have plenty of it.

Fifty-percent of the director's job honestly is casting the movie well.

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

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

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

Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

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

Woodcuts have a really timeless sort of feel, and they feel like a book that's a couple hundred years old.

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

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

Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid and wish you'd just stayed in bed?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.

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

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

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 used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.

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

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.

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.

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