Quotes from Stephen Graham Jones

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

But, really, I just like horror. Not everything has some dark reason behind it.

Denorah hates that she'd believed that, once upon a time. And she wants to cry for not getting to believe it anymore. Yes, the deer drank milk, and that left their mouths ringed white. Fuck it. Run, run.

Each time he came back with all his fingers he would flash thumbs-up all around the platform to show how he was lucky, how none of this was ever going to touch him.

But everything's Horror, isn't it? Sometimes you just can't see the blood

But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear's going to eat you, a bear's going to eat you, and then you go about your day.

He's dying, is still trying to save her, because he's not going to let Jade die in these waters like his daughter did. It's what dads do. It's what they're supposed to do.

Shanna was the first to go. And by "go" I mean die. And by "die" I mean get killed.

Is it really winning if everybody dies?

Don't let anybody ever tell you life's fair. Not as long as I'm in it.

Lewis finds the fourteen-foot aluminum ladder under boxes in the garage, Three Stooges in into the backyard...

Damn the future, right? It's right now that matters. When you don't have a fu- ture, it's always right now that means everything.

You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

It was a good day to die, but nobody did.

You said this place was haunted," Shooting Glasses tells her. "By all the ghosts of who everybody used to want to be, before they died inside," Jade says.

Fifty thousand ancestors, going back and back, each of them a final girl. But, that's just it, isn't it? They were plural, not singular, that's where horror movies have it all wrong, that's where the slasher lies: it's not about a lone girl carving her way to daylight, is it? It's about two girls making it across the ice together.

Got some red on me, yeah," she kind-of-quotes, shrugging his inspection off, all the tiny scars up and down her thighs and hips crawling over themselves to be seen.

In the old days, the boy's mom would have gotten a name for what she did: Shoots the Car Twice or Four Holes in the Glass or Doesn't Ever Learn or Can't Stop Fighting.

Stupid girls run upstairs, stupid girls run upstairs," she's saying to herself, turning to pull Ben with her up the aluminum steps, Billie Jean just feet behind them

Only stupid Indians brush past a bunch of hard-handed white dudes, each of them sure that seat you had in the bar, it should have, by right, been theirs. They're cool with the Chief among them being the chain monkey, but when it comes down to who has an eyeline on the white woman, well, that's another thing altogether, isn't it?

That's how it is with werewolves. You have something, then you just have the story of it.

And it's not just Freddy to watch for in a place like this. Wishmaster could step into the passage between the two cells, use his drug dealer voice to ask her if she'd like to walk through these solid bars to freedom, and if Jade was tired enough, she might not remember to word this wish with utmost care, and end up being pulled like taffy through the steel bars. No thank you.