Words matter. These are the best Stephen Graham Jones Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Jeans and sneakers are definitely best for the haunted house. They usually won’t let you in with a mask, even. It makes sense. They need to be able to tell who the rubes are. And, sneakers are good because the ground’s uneven, and you’re running and falling and stepping on the slower of your friends.
With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.
The whole ‘starting with stories, ending with novels’ thing, it’s probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
In the fast zombie stories, it’s not our humanity that is at stake anymore. It’s our survival.
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.
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.
People shouldn’t go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.
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.
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.
I would highly, highly recommend seeing ‘Paranormal Activity’ with a friend or, better yet, a group.
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.
You can’t negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse – that’s to eat us or our brains.
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.
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.
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.
With the Romero zombie, you usually did not have a reason for the infection, the plague, the virus, whatever it’s called.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it’s going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
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.
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.
Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They’re no longer the scary creature in the dark.
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
There’s no purer feeling in the world than being scared.
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.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before ‘writer,’ it’s a way of dismissing the writer.
You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.
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.
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.
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.
I think America would do anything through a drive-through.
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.
