Wes Craven

“I think everybody goes off and does their own vision. And I don't take responsibility for other people's work, frankly. It's bad enough taking responsibility for my own.”

“Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.”

“I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.”

“I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn't matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.”

“All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.”

“You have to be aware of what the audience's expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren't looking.”

“The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.”

“I remember going to a funeral at a very fundamentalist church, and I just had to get out of there. I went out in the parking lot and just sobbed. I think there was a sense of loss of that little boy not knowing if he was right or wrong. Everything I grew up with I had to walk away from.”

“I went to a Christian college. You would be expelled if you were caught in a movie theater. It was ridiculous.”

“I was always told that films were evil and such, but I started to realise what a load of crap it was that something this good should be forbidden. I had been allowed to read as much as I wanted when I was younger, so I recognised great art when I saw it; I just didn't realise it would be at the cinema as well.”

“I came from a very strict background.”

“In 'Scream,' there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama.”

“'To Kill a Mockingbird' was so important because it was such adult film-making - to see something that dealt with such an important issue and had such an enlightened outlook on the world.”

“If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there's an immense amount of freedom within the genre.”

“Everybody's making horror films and, to me, not especially well.”

“I can see that I give my audience something. I can see it in their eyes, and they say 'Thank you' a lot. You realize you are doing something that means something to people.”

“A businessman can be as military as any politician.”

“I never went to film school, so I never had the chance to be rejected.”

“A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?”

“My mother wouldn't even let me read DC Comics. I came from a very strict background.”