Quotes from Stephen Graham Jones

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

People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.

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.

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?

We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.

I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in.

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.

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.

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.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

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

Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.

I would highly, highly recommend seeing 'Paranormal Activity' with a friend or, better yet, a group.

This is all you really need, isn't it? Just one good friend. Somebody you can be stupid with. Somebody who'll peel you up off the ground, prop you against the wall.

We're from where we're from," she says back. "Scars are part of the deal, aren't they?

Horror's not a symptom, it's a love affair.

What he didn't say was that you don't get cold-resistant because your jackets suck, you just stop complaining about it after a while, because complaining doesn't make you any warmer.

The land claims what you leave behind.

An elk mother, cornered, will slash with her hooves and tear with her mouth and even offer the hope of her own hamstrings, and if none of that works, she'll rise again years and years later, because it's never over, it's always just beginning again.

My heart is a chainsaw, yes, but you're the one who starts it.

Some girls just don't know how to die.

And, if I'm to be honest here, yes, I did indeed stop trying, finally. But the body breathes whether you want it to or not. The heart keeps beating. Perhaps because it knows more than you do--knows that, past this experience, a whole new life will open up, and whatever infirmities persist, they can be dealt with one by one.

If you're not a beautiful monster, then you're a villager