Stephen Graham Jones

“I think America would do anything through a drive-through.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s.”

“There's no purer feeling in the world than being scared.”

“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.”

“The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.”

“Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“He stood over her for as long as he could endure the cold, long enough for the boy tending the dead to pass twice on fingertips and toes. The boy's self-appointed mission was to keep all of their eyes closed, the dead. Otherwise he couldn't sleep, the boy. But he never did anyway, as far as the Agent could tell. Any hour, there he'd be, scuttling from body to body under his calf robe. Many nights when the Agent locked his door, it wasn't to keep the Piegan from stealing his tins and blankets, but to keep the boy's hands from covering his own eyes.”