Stephen Graham Jones

“Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They're no longer the scary creature in the dark.”

“Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.”

“With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.”

“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.”

“The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.”

“. . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter.But it did.”

“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.”

“In the fast zombie stories, it's not our humanity that is at stake anymore. It's our survival.”

“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.”

“Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.”

“You can't negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse - that's to eat us or our brains.”

“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.”