Top 35 Paul G. Tremblay Quotes

Marshmallows are kind of weird. I’m not a huge fan. I mean, they’re fun when they get molten and melty at the end of a stick, but I always burn my mouth because I’m not all that smart or patient.

I’m certainly no hardcore backpacker, but I do enjoy being out in the woods for a few hours.

Pop country definitely frightens me, how popular it is.

I want folks to take horror seriously.

The feeling of having no choice or no say is a fear of mine, partly because the idea of loosening oneself from the burden and responsibility of choice and consequence is so intoxicating.

Getting into graduate school was pure luck.

A large part of the appeal of this novel when I was lucky enough to stumble across the story idea for ‘A Head Full of Ghosts’ was that I’d finally be writing a horror novel. In a lot of ways, the book is both my criticism of and love letter to horror.

I’ve been a fan of horror and studying it for as long as I can remember.

After my debut didn’t go very well with Holt, I needed to be in a healthier head space. I was happy to emerge from there. You will always have those negative thoughts as a writer, but you can’t let them take over. If you let them take over, those are the real page killers.

When you trust your subconscious enough to put something in a story and then figure out why it really needed to be there later, when that works out, aye, that’s the stuff.

I always wanted to write a book that would have people talking, theorizing, arguing.

‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ is excellent. I adore how the film is both grounded in realism and, at the same time, it has an ethereal, nightmarish atmosphere.

I became a reader – never mind a writer – because of Stephen King.

Crime, horror, and satire each aim to reveal an ugly or uncomfortable truth: one that, after the reveal, will ensure we’ll never be the same. The big difference between those genres being the effect they create.

I was definitely a child of the ’80s. Cable TV was new. I watched a ton of movies and a ton of TV. HBO would show the same movies over and over again, so I’d watch the same movies over and over again.

What keeps me up at night is our nation’s continued and burgeoning lack of rationality in response to mass shootings.

I’m a daydreamer – a purposeful one when I’m writing fiction.

Any day in which I get writing done is ideal to me.

So much of my work is about children and/or parenting; it’s something I’m drawn to without being able to completely articulate why.

Ambiguity is our permanent state, isn’t it? We don’t like it being so. Most of us crave order and routine, and yet yawning before us is our future, as frightening as it is thrilling.

I do remember dancing in my living room when my short story ‘The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat’ won a Chizine fiction contest in 2002.

How children attempt to deal with everyday comedies and tragedies, and mortality, is universal and ultimately such a large part of what it means to be human.

As an adult, I’ve learned to cope and pull the plug on the worst what-ifs before my mind takes me to a place from which I can’t return.

I have to admit to being a music snob. I think, in a parallel universe, I pretty easily could have been Jack Black’s character from ‘High Fidelity,’ working in a record store and snidely commenting on everyone’s purchases.

Math was always my best subject growing up.

The response to ‘A Head Full of Ghosts’ has been amazing and thrilling. I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel a little extra pressure trying to follow it up.

I think I got serious about writing in the late ’90s. The first stuff I wrote was terrible and got rejected, but I started getting more encouraging rejection letters.

I won’t call ‘Cabin’ an anti-home invasion story, because that’s not exactly true, but the home-invasion subgenre is one I generally don’t gravitate toward as a reader or film viewer.

Whenever you bring reality TV into the mix, it’s only a matter of time before, whatever fiction you come up with, it’ll become real.

‘A Head Full of Ghosts’ was my first full horror novel, and that felt like coming home as a writer.

I usually dread writing non-fiction. I don’t feel comfortable or confident writing essays and the like.

When it comes to actually writing the book/story, I work on a computer. I wish I could write longhand, but I can’t.

There’s no objective reason anyone can point to that proves a horror story is innately inferior or that it’s doomed to fail as a work of art because of it being horror. Anyone saying otherwise is being intellectually dishonest.

For too many of our citizens, Christianity has become entwined with the ecstatic worship of the gun and violence. For the adherents, there is no compassion, no love thy neighbor, no peace, no reason, and God only helps those who arm themselves.

There are great and terrible consequences to any act of violence, and they reverberate beyond the act itself.