Rick Riordan Quotes

It's hard to say what drives a three year-old, but I think I had a sense that nature was my solace, and nature was a place in which there was beauty, in which there was order.

I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!

Living in that childish wonder is a most beautiful feeling - I can so well remember it. There was always something more - behind and beyond everything - to me, the golden spectacles were very, very big.

Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.

When you taste things in the right order, sometimes they taste so much different than if you taste them out of order. Not that there's a right order, like by rule, but just like in a thoughtful way that makes sense.

When I'm an audience member I do not want to go and see something that I already know, I want to see something that I don't know. I want to be surprised and stimulated to think about something. I want the magic. I want to be in a situation of uncertainty; that's what excites me.

Some things, I think, like fairy books and secret doors, are only meant to be found by children.

As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open. We believe that the bad guy always loses and that the tooth fairy sneaks into our rooms at night to put money under our pillow. Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possible. We continuously experience life with a sense of newness and unbridled curiosity.

It is the childlike mind that finds the kingdom.

I believe that hunger for a 'lost dimension' of experience is a natural yearning in all of us, and it doesn't go away just because we ignore it. It is evidenced among other places in the millions of children and adults who obsessively read the 'Harry Potter' books. It is said that fiction is where someone gets to tell the truth.

Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.

… a fairyland to us, for all intents and purposes—a land of enchantment and awful mystery.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

If you lose wonder, you've lost everything.

I think the secret to what Jim Henson did, ultimately, is that he understood how to cut through to the... I know this sounds corny... but the child inside of you.

I love the unexplainable. It would be so boring to me if everything could be explained.

That part of life is the thing that we really need to concentrate on. If you lose the way children look through their eyes at the world, it really becomes kind of a doldrum.

Remain in wonder if you want the mysteries to open up for you. Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning. Questioners sooner or later end up in a library. Questioners sooner or later end up with scriptures, because scriptures are full of answers. And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder.

Everybody finished the song at different times. Dumbledore conducted their last few lines with his wand and when they had finished, he was one of those who clapped loudest. 'Ah music,' he said, wiping his eyes. 'A magic beyond all we do here!

Children see magic because they look for it.

The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

Learn to get excited like a child. There is nothing that has more magic than childish excitement.

Before there can be wonders, there must be wonder.

As a magician, you must think about chaos and order. Those are the two forces that control the universe.

The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.