Quotes from Benjamin Percy

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time.

I grew up in western Oregon, just outside Eugene, on 27 wooded acres that served as my playground.

I don't flinch from darkness, but I've always been bothered by what I call gore-nography.

There is no cure for prions. They are a protein-based disease that, among other things, targets and transforms your brain. The symptoms reveal themselves differently in each host, and you might go months or you might go years before you realize you're infected.

My voice is rather quirky. It's abysmally low. People often think I'm putting it on at first. Think drunk Darth Vader. Or Barry White singing country. It suits my dark material. When I do readings, I really play it up and go subterranean. I can make the phone book sound terrifying.

It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.

People like to pigeonhole. People like to label - not just books and movies, but everything in their life. If people want to call me 'literary horror,' I guess that's fine. What I'm trying to do is be both thrilling and thought-provoking.

Bookstores should be broken down into two sections: books that suck and books that don't suck.

Plagues don't just kill people—and that's what lobos is, a plague—they kill humanity.

if he sees his fellow humans as anything more than complicated animals. Not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design.

When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug - riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches.

The editor-writer relationship should not be thought of as adversarial.

Fear beats logic every time,

Q: What's the key to suspense? A: I'll tell you later.

The best way to mess with the head of your reader is to strategize the delivery of bad news.

All stories are in conversation with other stories. —Neil Gaiman

We wore headlamps and the sight of us bobbing up the hill or zipping perilously down it had the look of busy stars, as if the night sky had come down to join us in our play.

The more characters you have, the bigger the book, the more flaming chain saws.

It's like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don't you see, that's a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.

he feels the darkness of the grave pressing around the fire and infecting his vision so that there seems to be no separation between the living and the dead, a child born with a mud wasp's nest for a heart and its eyes already pocketed with dust, ready to be clapped into a box and dropped down a hole.

Someone once told him the scariest part of any story was when a character crept forward to investigate a strange sound. Whatever nightmare waited around the corner did not matter, its revelation almost always a disappointment. It was the imagined threat that mattered most.

It's hard to become an adult in the place where you grew up. Because you can never escape who you were.

The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can't quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That's how it is between them. There is something celestial about her, her skin a pale color, but a paleness of the softest gray-white imaginable, as if she had been soaking for years in a bath of moonlight.