Quotes from Paul G. Tremblay

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 feel like too many horror writers and filmmakers sort of just assume that the default is, 'The horror movie must be all atmosphere first and everything else second.'

While being a parent has been the most fulfilling experience of my life, it comes with a price. Besides the onslaught of worries and fears that can be paralyzing, more personally there is a struggle with identity, or the fear of loss or usurpsion of identity, if that makes sense.

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.

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.

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

There are many talented and worthy writers engaging horror in new, imaginative, and yes, terrifying ways.

If what needs to get done is going to get done, then I can't screw around with the luxury of writing rituals or waiting for pristine writing conditions to magically materialize.

'The Cabin at the End of the World' is my riff on the 'home invasion' subgenre of horror/suspense. Hopefully it's a big, loud, dark riff.

In the early 2000s, I started selling some short stories to horror markets. I joined the Horror Writers Association.

Ambiguity and the horror of possibility play a part in so many of my favorite horror stories: Shirley Jackson's 'We Will Always Live in the Castle,' Mark Danielewski's 'House of Leaves,' Victor LaValle's 'Big Machine,' Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' Stewart O'Nan's 'The Speed Queen,' and so many more.

I'm harsh on myself. But let's be honest: I'm not as harsh as the online one-star critic who says, 'This book is boring and stupid and smells like poo.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't consciously sit down thinking I'm blurring genre lines, for the most part. I try to stay focused solely on serving the needs of the particular story on which I'm working.

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

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

The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel.

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

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.

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 was a good boy in high school , and I read for English class, and I vaguely remember reading, as a kid, 'Choose Your Own Adventure' stuff, but I didn't really read for pleasure.