Quotes from Ellen Datlow

I'll read any anthologies or collection I can get my hands on. If I find a book mentioned in 'Publisher's Weekly,' and it looks like it will be dark, I'll track it down.

I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.

Editing cannot be taught. Developing your own taste cannot be taught.

Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.

I feel lucky that I get to read and publish stories that are not necessarily overtly horror in 'Best Horror of the Year.'

I hate being bored when I read a story. Even a well-trod theme can be made fresh by a different perspective or fresh writing.

I am a collector of dolls and doll parts. I'm rarely creeped out by most dolls, either in real life or in literature, but I know many people who are.

The genres of the fantastic and the grotesque are far more interesting to me than most mnemonic fiction.

Angels can't die yet I imagine it. A psychiatrist at that place once told me it was a projection. Like with movies. Light passes through the film and it gets bigger on the screen. I guess he was saying thought and faith have that kind of power. But he had no fucking idea who he was dealing with.

Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer.

It was a nice voice, smooth and deep as double chocolate ice cream.

Rudge was not a pessimist, but he'd lived long enough to know that hope had to be kept on a short leash.

The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters. We would, however, like to clarify a few points. For instance, by the time we realized what Jeffrey had been up to, he was gone.

It's easier to acquiesce. Everyone does, they tell him.

Her name was Flower, oddly imprecise for one so much herself, as though her parents had wrestled with names like Daisy, Violet, and Rose, lost their way amid so many choices, and settled for this generic solution.

And as for me—feel no sorrow. When you see the wind stir the greenwood, or when you turn the pages of a book made from a tree's still-blameless flesh, lean close and listen. You hear my voice.

My parents threw out the diary when they found it. They didn't want me keeping secrets in my room, never mind that a room and a girl will keep secrets even without pages to store them.

I'd go with her, like a flash I'd go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel's sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean.

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve the man but deteriorate the cat—" Now

Times have changed. People live longer, but that hasn't translated into longer childhoods.

My bad thoughts and fears stop and I Iook up through the ice, and see a world I never belonged in, that never wanted me.

I subscribe to the tea-kettle theory of art," she'd responded. "Open the valve and the energy escapes.

If the Governor speaks of ideals, they are "selfless ideals"; if he speaks of paths to be taken, they are "untrod paths." The Governor is one who leaves no cliché unturned

Blood kin are hard to hide from.