Brian Selznick Quotes

I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me.

I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy.

I think that my first book - I was trying to write the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. So it's sort of, like, a book inspired by my childhood reading and the passion that I felt about reading when I was a kid.

When you can see kids smiling, that's one of the best things. That's why I did 'Narnia.'

Between the theme parks and the movies, the Disney iconography was probably the first set of archetypes that I was exposed to. Walt was able to expose me as a child to the full array of emotions, including fear and sorrow. Those movies and attractions haunted my dreams and made a deep impression on me as a child.

I grew up with a lot of fairy tales. And they had an essence of darkness to them.

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.

When I was a kid, I saw 'Heavy Metal' the movie, and my mind was blown. I loved the idea that you could have all these different stories in different styles that are linked together.

I always thought, if I was gonna make a kids show, I would want to make something that my own 12-year-old self would love. So, I put all that in a blender and stewed it together to create 'Gravity Falls.'

When we were kids, I know when I saw 'Pinocchio' it had a huge impact. I was ten years old, and I went home, and I was drawing the characters.

Fairy tales were great because they provided a no-limits playground for my imagination, and growing up, there's nothing more exciting.

I was way into 'Voltron,' Ray Harryhausen: anything with giant monsters, I was really into. Even dinosaurs - for a while, I wanted to be a paleontologist. So it's almost like primal, ancestral mythology to me, this fascination with monsters.

People ask me, 'Why angels? Why paranormal? Why teens?' In the beginning, I'm not sure I knew I was starting down any of those twisted paths - paths that now seem so familiar to me that they are downright comforting. In the beginning, I was just writing about love.

I think that sense of wonderment, where you walk out expecting the ordinary and are confronted by the extraordinary, is something that has always interested me, whether in TV or comic books.

With my writing, I can still play inside an enchanted castle or live inside an old fort. I can run from ghosts or ride dolphins any day of the week.

Every time I see a good play or watch a good movie, I have the same feeling I had as a child of wanting to be that person on stage or wanting to run through the forest with a big dress on.

I like something where I can really use my imagination and be an active participant in the construction of the monster and usually that's in the world of the supernatural or the world of the fantastic, so that's why those kinds of stories about demons and the supernatural appeal to me or maybe I'm really interested in that subject.

I was a huge fantasy geek growing up. I was the dungeon master in my D&D game.

My interest in fantasy began pretty much when I started to read.

Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.

I wasn't a big science-fiction fan growing up. But I loved Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes. Both came into play on 'The X-Files.'

I definitely love fantasy and would want to be in a fantasy project.

I do what I do because of Walt Disney - his films and his theme park and his characters and his joy in entertaining.

I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped.