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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What I believe when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You are here for a reason - and it's not to fail and die.

I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.