Quotes from Stephen Graham Jones

That's not me anymore, I told you! I was a scared little girl, I thought— I thought if I knew all the rules, then that would mean—that would mean nothing would happen to me!

You really named her 'Linnea'?" "Linnea's a survivor." "She dies in every movie." "Her characters do, but she goes from movie to movie," Letha says. "She never dies.

Sarah Michelle Gellar was in two marquee slashers in the same year," Letha says right back. "But she's no Linnea.

The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

In the 40 years since 'The Amityville Horror', dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough - special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough - that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization's loyalty to the core story.

You can't negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse - that's to eat us or our brains.

With the Romero zombie, you usually did not have a reason for the infection, the plague, the virus, whatever it's called.

We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world.

In the fast zombie stories, it's not our humanity that is at stake anymore. It's our survival.

Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.

With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.

In 1984, when 'Nightmare on Elm Street' came out, not only was I twelve and couldn't get into an R movie, but I lived twenty miles from a theater. So my first experience of it was on VHS.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D.

Jeans and sneakers are definitely best for the haunted house. They usually won't let you in with a mask, even. It makes sense. They need to be able to tell who the rubes are. And, sneakers are good because the ground's uneven, and you're running and falling and stepping on the slower of your friends.

The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.

The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.

Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.