Brian Keene Quotes

When you died, you were supposed to live on in the memories of others. That's what I'd always been told. Didn't matter what you believed, which religion you subscribed to, what god you worshipped. The simple fact was that none of us knew what lay beyond. Immortality and eternal life? The only sure shot at that was the memories of those you left behind - your friends and family ...

In late 2001, I contributed a short story called 'Castaways' to an anthology called 'In Laymon's Terms,' which was a tribute to Richard Laymon, who had passed away earlier that year.

We're not going to make it, I said.
The words caught in my throat, choking me. What was it Leslie had said to me when we were discussing Shannon's and Antoinetta's disappearance? 'You're beginning to sound like one of the characters in your books, Adam.' She'd been right. If this were a novel my heroes would have arrived just in the nick of time and saved the day. But real life didn't work like that. Real life had no happy endings. Despite our best efforts, despite my love for Tara [his wife] and my determination to protect her, and after everything we'd been through at the LeHorn house, fate conspired against us. We were still nine or ten miles from home, and night was almost upon us. By the time we got there it would already be too late. I fought back tears. I had the urge just to lie down in the middle of the road and let the next car run over me.

What a crazy way to be buried, he thought as he hunted. Get your body burned up and then poured into a box that looked like a library book, like your relatives could check you out and take you home for a couple of weeks. Would there be an overdue penalty if they were late bringing back the dead?

Being a writer involves writing. You've got to commit to sitting down and writing instead of Xbox or Netflix.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

In real life, the monsters are the ones abducting and killing children or flying hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers or looting our treasury and sending our kids off to fight a bullshit war just so they can line their own pockets and the pockets of their corporate buddies or eradicating our Bill of Rights in the name of national security. Those are the real monsters.

'Ghoul' was what my world looked like, growing up in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and what I thought it looked like. A lot of my personal experiences went into it.

We are many. Our number is greater than the stars. We are more than infinity.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

'Castaways' was a play on what if a reality show like 'Survivor' was unknowingly set on an island inhabited by a sub-human race of creatures? Readers have often asked me to consider turning the short story into a full-length novel. So I did.

They want to control humankind through what they call selective breeding. The Nazis started it, but now the nwo are continuing it. See, the only way to control population is to first get it back down to manageable size. They're culling the herd, same way the game commission does when deer population gets out of control. That's why we've got diseases like cancer and aids. You telling me that we can put a little goddamn skateboard-looking robot on Mars and have it send pictures back, but we can't find a cure for cancer? There's a cure. You can bet on that, boys. There's a goddamn cure. They just won't release it because cancer helps cut down the population.

When you're writing fulltime like I am, writing to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head and food on the table, you can't afford to have writer's block.