Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.

We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.

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

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice
blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

. . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter.
But it did.

My grandfather used to tell me he was a werewolf. He'd

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.

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

I would highly, highly recommend seeing 'Paranormal Activity' with a friend or, better yet, a group.

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

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake.

My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers.

If you're not a beautiful monster, then you're a villager,

Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.

I'm all right," I told her. This is a lie, when you're twelve. And all the other years, too.

For them, ten years ago, that's another lifetime.
For you, it's yesterday.

For me, the facts in anything are always secondary. You don't lie convincingly with the truth. You lie convincingly with being a good liar.

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

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

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.

Lewis made sure Shaney left with an armload of books, a whole series, to prove to Peta why she'd been there, but the whole time, stacking them up, it felt like an overcorrection, like trying to hide a body on the lawn by covering it with eight other bodies.

It was his punishment, to become Blackfeet, to be Piegan. To live on the reservation he'd created, the situation he was already leaving behind. To replace his own life with an Indian one, and thus know firsthand the end result of his policies. An end result generations away from last Winter, just so he could see the scope of what he'd done, that it still had traceable effect. So that, in a sense, he could be inflicting it upon himself.
He nodded, accepted this.

Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s.

Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.

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.

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

But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear's going to eat you, a bear's going to eat you, and then you go about your day.

If the main character's not in jeopardy - physical, psychological, emotional, whatever - then you don't have any tension, and you don't have a story.

When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.

Angels, demons, sex. Heaven, hell, war. Blood and royalty, history and magic, fire and ice. And a story you cannot put down. This is fantasy at its best.

But everything's Horror, isn't it? Sometimes you just can't see the blood

In the old days, the boy's mom would have gotten a name for what she did: Shoots the Car Twice or Four Holes in the Glass or Doesn't Ever Learn or Can't Stop Fighting.

The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

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

And, if I'm to be honest here, yes, I did indeed stop trying, finally. But the body breathes whether you want it to or not. The heart keeps beating. Perhaps because it knows more than you do--knows that, past this experience, a whole new life will open up, and whatever infirmities persist, they can be dealt with one by one.

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.

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.

If there's any better place to get stoned than a rolling box full of pastry, then they didn't have the keys for it, anyway.

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.

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

It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter.

People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.

Stupid girls run upstairs, stupid girls run upstairs," she's saying to herself, turning to pull Ben with her up the aluminum steps, Billie Jean just feet behind them

I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in.

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

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

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.

When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.