Top 35 Rick Riordan Quotes

I saw ‘The 39 Clues‘ as a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way – to take some of these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive.

I love teaching. I love working with kids… maybe some day I’ll go back to the classroom. I’m not ready to say it’ll never happen.

I’m a teacher still, but with a much larger classroom.

Even if these stories are 3,000 years old, there’s still so much about the characters, about the dilemmas, about their understanding of the universe that still resonates. The whole idea of order and chaos, which is really central to the ancient Egyptian understanding of the world, is still very much with us.

I wanted my students to leave my classroom loving reading and wanting to read more, and if they left my classroom thinking that reading is boring, then I haven‘t done my job.

I like to have a simple workplace.

I don’t think I would ever inch my way up to Y.A. That audience is very well served. There are a lot of wonderful writers writing for Y.A. I feel like I’m in the right place.

The deeper I go into mythology, the more I find. I originally did five ‘Percy Jackson‘ books. I thought that would cover Greek mythology and I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s ever-expanding.

I don’t teach anymore, but I can still clearly see fifth period after lunch – that’s a real tough time to teach. And I tried to imagine writing a story that would appeal to those kids – even when they’re tired, even when they’re bouncing off the walls.

I’ve always found the second book in a series is the hardest to write.

I love Norse mythology – Thor and Odin and Loki – amazing characters.

It is true that I once refused to eat haggis in Scotland and this did not sit well with the local population.

I’ve never been a collector – just a consumer – and these days unless a book is signed to me by another author, I don’t normally have any qualms about passing it to a friend or donating it to the library.

I think kids will read more good books than we can possibly produce.

I have to be careful. My readers are very detail-oriented, and if I make a mistake they’ll call me on it.

I don’t think about being famous, really. Being an author, I don’t generally get stopped as I walk down the street. It’s not like being a movie star.

I think that kids have a greater capacity for processing things than we give them credit for.

Because I am kind of distracted, I don’t tend to sit at my desk 9 to 5. It can be two hours a day, or, when I’m in the final editing stages, it can be 14 hours a day.

It’s hard enough to be a middle-school kid, because you’re dealing with so many facets of your identity – you’re changing socially, you’re changing physically, you’re changing emotionally, everything is in flux, and to put race on top of that as well and have to figure out your racial identity is extremely hard.

I always love it when I hear back from kids who say they discovered Percy Jackson and now wear their learning difference as a badge of honour.

It’s not easy. I got lots of rejections when I first started out. If you want to write, you have to believe in yourself and not give up. You have to do your best to practice and get better.

‘Harry Potter‘ opened so many doors for young adult literature. It really did convince the publishing industry that writing for children was a viable enterprise. And it also convinced a lot of people that kids will read if we give them books that they care about and love.

Kids ask me questions. You’d think after doing this for four years, I would have heard every single question anyone could think of to ask, but no, every time, they surprise me, they ask me something I never thought of before.

Turkey, Australia, and Japan are three of my top destinations.

I’ve been reading Greek mythology since I was a kid. I also taught it when I was a sixth grade teacher, so I knew a lot of mythological monsters already. Sometimes I still use books and Web sites to research, though. Every time I research Greek mythology, I learn something new!

My goal in the classroom was always to make sure they were having so much fun that they didn’t realize they were learning.

The older I get, the less I obsess about material stuff. In fact, stuff has become the enemy. There always seems to be more of it than I have storage in my house!

There are so many fantastic stories and I want to bring Thor and Odin and the other gods into the modern world, just like I did with the Greeks and ‘Percy Jackson.’ I’ll give the books an urban setting and have young people interacting with the Norse gods.

We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.

When I was young, my favorite picture book was ‘Fletcher and Zenobia,’ written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It’s long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children’s book for the times.

There are days when I’ll write for 15 minutes and have to give up and move around, and I’ll write another paragraph and give up again. On other days I get intensely – focused on the process, sit down at 8 A.M. and won’t get up until 8 P.M.

I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.

For me, writing for kids is harder because they’re a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid’s not going to do that. They will drop the book.

Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn’t writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.

Writing ‘Book 1: The Maze of Bones‘ didn’t feel much different than writing one of my other novels, but I thought it was very innovative to offer the website and trading card components as well for those readers who wanted to go more in depth with the Cahill experience.