Quotes from Ramsey Campbell

personal expression … book lacks the disciplines of semiology

Tradition is a pretty poor excuse for perpetrating stereotypes.

One way to avoid what has already been done is to be true to yourself.

Smile while you can,' Hettie Close had scrawled in ink almost as faded as the print above it. 'Smile like the skull you'll be, you fool, before you're worse than bones.

The corridor didn't seem long enough to contain so much blackness. 'Passing Through Peacehaven

Perhaps the woman was waiting beneath the lamps for cats to drop from the trees, like fruit.

He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn't this passage too short? No, it wasn't a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him—then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.

I nearly forced my own way through the undergrowth to leave the sight behind. I was afraid I'd encouraged the figure to advance by trying to see it, perhaps even by thinking about it. ("The Long Way")

He slammed the door and ran blindly down the corridor, grabbing at handles. What exactly had he seen? They had been eating with their bare hands, but somehow the only thought he could hold on to was a kind of sickened gratitude that he had been unable to see their faces.

When he shut himself in his apartment he found that he hoped he was waiting for nothing at all.

As soon as Todd drove off the motorway it vanished from the mirror, and so did the sun across the moor.

Unlike the rest he had seen of the bungalow, the hall beyond the door was dark. He could see the glimmer of three doors and several framed photographs lined up along the walls. The sound of flies was louder, though they didn't seem to be in the hall itself. Now that he was closer they sounded even more like someone groaning feebly, and the rotten smell was stronger too.

The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God's sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return.

The best spells are the ones you write yourself.

I don't care much for this homogenised religion, and I told him so. This notion that you mustn't think your way to faith is obviously not far from the intolerance that leads to burning books.

All day Ben had felt surrounded by signs too secret to interpret: the dance of decaying leaves in the air, the long shadows where the autumn chill lurked like winter biding its time, a sun which looked swollen with blood as the mist dragged it down beyond the unconvincing cut-out shapes the houses had become.

horses which drew the hearse, and far more ineffectual. Every open grave I had to stand beside was a gateway to knowledge which nobody other than I appeared to realise was there to be tapped. As mourners dropped earth on the coffin it sounded very much like knocking on a door, and I imagined how terrified the priest and his little congregation would be if any opened in the earth.

The measurements of space and time, the photographs of far stars and of points of light which proved to be composed of thousands of stars, filled him with an awe which felt like the edge of a delicious panic.

Everything was real except her.

As the light wavered into the rooms, they looked impossibly large with darkness, which seemed less still than it ought to be.

On Aigburth Road, wind was doing its best to direct the shoppers, but failed to throw Rose under a car. Layer on layer of dark cloud piled up like sediment at the horizon. Against the sky trees glared, bunches of frayed rusty wire. Birds were scraps of light high overhead, in danger of being blown out. Above a church doorway a Virgin and Child were caged by wire netting, which rattled as though they were trying to escape.

Mischief is the way evil toys with the world. Its presence can corrupt the very fabric of existence.

far softer than putty, indeed, to be able to do to her what they began to do then.

the most enjoyable Western she knew and one of the most fruitful to analyze, but her students could see only John Wayne's politics: his presence wiped out the rest of the film for them, destroyed its personality. "But one has to take their feelings into account," she said.