Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.
There's no purer feeling in the world than being scared.
The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.
With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.
Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.
Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.
In the fast zombie stories, it's not our humanity that is at stake anymore. It's our survival.
You can't negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse - that's to eat us or our brains.
People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.
I would highly, highly recommend seeing 'Paranormal Activity' with a friend or, better yet, a group.
What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.
I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in.
Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s.
With the Romero zombie, you usually did not have a reason for the infection, the plague, the virus, whatever it's called.
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They're no longer the scary creature in the dark.
For me, the facts in anything are always secondary. You don't lie convincingly with the truth. You lie convincingly with being a good liar.
Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.
This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.
We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world.
If the main character's not in jeopardy - physical, psychological, emotional, whatever - then you don't have any tension, and you don't have a story.
The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.
Angels, demons, sex. Heaven, hell, war. Blood and royalty, history and magic, fire and ice. And a story you cannot put down. This is fantasy at its best.
You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it?
I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.
This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.
Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.
The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
In 1984, when 'Nightmare on Elm Street' came out, not only was I twelve and couldn't get into an R movie, but I lived twenty miles from a theater. So my first experience of it was on VHS.
You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake.
Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.
Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.
In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D.
Joe Lansdale is one of the few writers able to write in whatever genre or mode he wants on any particular day. How? He doesn't ask permission. He just steps in, out-writes everybody in the room.
If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.
I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.
Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.
It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter.
My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers.
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.
In the 40 years since 'The Amityville Horror', dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough - special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough - that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization's loyalty to the core story.
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.