Kenneth Oppel Quotes
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I think good art should always be entertaining, or at least give pleasure of some sort. And my chief goal as a writer has always been to tell a good story and give my readers a good time.
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Flying into a storm, even its outer edges, did not seem like a good idea to me. And this was no ordinary tempest. Everyone on the bridge knew what it was: the Devil's Fist, a near-eternal typhoon that migrated about the North Indian basin year-round. She was infamous, and earned her name by striking airships out of the sky.
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We used to flock to watch gladiators, public torture and executions. In more recent times, our appetite for mortal violence has been sublimated in sports, photorealistic video games, film and literature.
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The more I worked on 'Half Brother,' the more it seemed to me the story was really about love in all its possible forms - how and why we decide to bestow it, or withdraw it; how we decide what is more worthy of being loved, and what is less. We are masters of conditional love.
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The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language.
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It's somewhat disquieting that the same parents and educators who are horrified by the notion of child soldiers have bestowed upon 'The Hunger Games' a double mantle of critical praise and global bestsellerdom.
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When I'd written my 'Silverwing' series - I'd imbued the bats with full human awareness and vocabulary.
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Realistically, the chance of any book becoming a film is slim.
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The world of 'The Hunger Games' is a paranoid survivalist's dream.
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I wrote 'Airborn' after completing three books about bats. I loved my bats, but what a treat it was to write about humans again. They could eat food other than midges and mosquitoes, they wore clothing, they slept in beds - all this struck me as wonderfully novel.
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One of the reasons I wrote 'Airborn' was that I'd fallen in love with the great passenger airships which flew in the '20s and '30s. Their time was short-lived. They were frail, they tended to crash; and they could never be as fast, safe and efficient as the airplanes that replaced them.
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I'm cursed with this puritanical streak that makes me want everything to be about something. It's a terrible affliction.