Andrew Pyper Quotes

Don't be crude, Professor. Profanity is one contest you will not win with me.

Tell me this. What is it with men and feeling like they have to act like self-destructive superheroes whenever trouble shows up?"
"It's the only way we know how to love.

What's the problem? In a nutshell?"

"I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.]

It's strange. Hearing you say my name."
"I can say it again if you'd like."
"No, I'll remember just fine.

I've never been able to figure out what you're so scared of, but there's something in you that's got you backed into a corner so tight your eyes are closed against it," she says. "You don't have to tell me what it is. I bet you don't even know yourself. But here's the thing: I probably won't be around for you when you face it down. I wish I could be, but I won't. You're going to need someone. You won't make it if you're alone. I don't know of anyone who could.

Cancer is a kind of possession, too. And like a demon, before it claims you, it nibbles away at who you are, erases the face you have always presented to the world to show the unwanted thing inside.

Monsters just outside our peripheral vision are scarier to contemplate than monsters miles away or in someplace only a fool would set foot in.

If the hairs on my neck stand up while I'm writing, I figure the reader will get the same kind of shock.

We need to kind of refresh our fear in order to refresh our understanding of how a safe place works.

Darkness isn't the matter from which the Antichrist was formed, but intelligence. Foreknowledge.

Though it's with you at every moment, it's always something of a surprise to discover that you can be at once alive and alone.

On the sidewalks everyone holding either a giant coffee or a cell phone, as though a law had been declared against public displays of empty-handedness.

And what do we have? A profound if sexless intimacy of a kind I've never known with either man or woman since childhood, and perhaps not even then.

Psychological horror is more interesting to me than the explicitly physical.

I just hated the law. I wasn't cut out for it. I couldn't imagine spending my life doing that, so I quit before I began.

Sometimes, monsters are real," Tess said, rolling over, leaving me alone with the ladybug staring up at me. "Even if they don't look like monsters.

Every poet - every storyteller - requires motivation.

Missing someone feels like hunger. An insatiable emptiness right at the core of yourself.

There are things in this world most of us never see," I find myself saying. "We've trained ourselves not to see them, or try to pretend we didn't if we do. But there's a reason why, no matter how sophisticated or primitive, every religion has demons.

I've seen the photos," he said.
"Photos are never the same as the real thing," I said.

To make the reader afraid, I had to be afraid.

Last night I had the dream again. Except it's not a dream I know because when it comes for me, I'm still awake.
There's my desk. The map on the wall. The Stuffed animals I don't play with anymore but don't want to hurt Dad's feelings by sticking in the closet I might be in bed. I might be just standing there, looking foe a missing sock. Then i'm gone.
it doesn't just show me somthing this time, it takes me from here to THERE> standing on the bank of a river of fire. A thousand wasps in my head. Fighting and dying inside my skull, their bodies piling up against the backs of me eyes. Stinging and stinging.
Dad's voice. Somewhere across the river. Calling my name. I've never heard him sound like that before. He's so frightened he can't hide it, even though he tries (he ALWAYS tries).
The dead boy floats by.
Facedown. So I wait for his head to pop up, show the holes where his eye used to be, say somthing with his blue lips. One of the terrible things it might make him do. But he just passes like a chunk of wood. I've never been here before, but I know it's real. The river is the line between this place and the Other Place. And I'm on the wrong side. There's a dark forest behind me but that's not what it is. I try to get to where Dad is. My toes touch the river and it sings with pain. Then there's arms pulling me back. Dragging me into the trees. They feel like a man's arms but it's not a man that sticks its fingers into my mouth. Nails that scratch the

Your melancholy. Or depression. Along with nine-tenths of the afflictions I've studied, diagnosed, attempted to treat. Call them whatever you like, but they're just different names for loneliness. That's what lets the darkness in. That's what you have to fight.

I enjoy a special collegiality among other writers in the thriller community. They call me 'Canada's scariest writer,' and I love that.

I am well and truly messed up.

about to knock again when the inside door is pulled open to reveal a sinewy woman dressed in what appears to be layers of old sweaters and an ankle-length denim skirt. Her long hair held back in an elastic that leaves the ends bunched and brittle as the head of a broom. Brown eyes wide and alive,

They're coming! All of us waiting for the little green men to probe us or decimate us or turn us into shrubbery.

Horror, for me, is not defined by the thing that provokes one's fear, but the human being who has contact with it.

What I see as the particularly exciting prospect for writing horror fiction as we go forward is setting stories in more internal landscapes than external ones, mapping out the mind as the home for scary things instead of the house at the end of the lane or lakeside campground or abandoned amusement park.

Don't stop to understand. You may never understand. Just keep going.

We need to talk." she says.
"The four most dreaded words in the history of marriage.

And this is the only really startling thing about the evil of the world: not that so much of it exists, but that nobody ever really expects it.