Quotes from Stephen Graham Jones

It's soft at the end. Not just the pain, but the world.

These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have who are spending too much time alone. They start unpacking vast cosmic bullshit from gum wrappers, and then they chew it up, blow a bubble, ride that bubble up into some even stupider place.

For them, ten years ago, that's another lifetime. For you, it's yesterday.

Can't I just like horror because it's great? Does there have to be some big explanation?

It's almost October though, and horror is my religion. Can I not celebrate orthodoxly and honor my church's holy days?

I'm all right, I told her. This is a lie, when you're twelve. And all the other years, too.

Sometimes they need help in the form of a furie running at them, her mouth open in a scream, her eyes white hot, her heart forever pure.

If there's any better place to get stoned than a rolling box full of pastry, then they didn't have the keys for it, anyway.

Lewis made sure Shaney left with an armload of books, a whole series, to prove to Peta why she'd been there, but the whole time, stacking them up, it felt like an overcorrection, like trying to hide a body on the lawn by covering it with eight other bodies.

Dealing with cops is like being around a skittish horse: No sudden movements, nothing shiny or loud. Zero jokes.

Everything makes sense if you look at it long enough.

We all become history at some point, right?

Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.

Sometimes you just know what you're doing is the only thing to be doing. That the world is conspiring all around you to make it happen, like, not just giving you permission, but herding you the direction you need to go, giving you secret nods and obvious hand signals, and getting everything out of the way so you have the clearest path possible.

When the whole world hurts, you bite it. Don't you?

That's how they were supposed to be. It's what they, at fifteen, were supposed to have been doing. They'd been fired into adolescence and were swerving to each side now like crazy, trying to find the straight and narrow.

She's a gorehound, a horror fiend, the more brutal the better, bring it on, faster, pussycat, kill kill kill, but that's all on-screen. And at some level she never forgets that all the blood's corn syrup.

Always feed a wolf his fill, the old woman quotes out loud, lest you wake with your throat in his jaws.

The ladder tilts the opposite way, like it doesn't want to be involved in anything this ugly, and all of this is in the slowest possible motion for Lewis, his head snapping as many pictures as it can on the way down, like they can stack up under him, break his fall.

Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

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.

You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake.

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.