Crime Horror Story Quotes

Standing before him, the blight of idyllic thought and aspiration--rotting souls reproducing like fleas. ~ Glen R. Krisch

I'm a fan of horror movies that have really good stories. ~ Scott Eastwood

Supernatural horror was one of the ways we found that would allow us to live with our double selves. By its employ, we discovered how to take all the things that victimize us in our natural lives and turn them into the very stuff of demonic delight in our fantasy lives. In story and song, we could entertain ourselves with the worst we could think of, overwriting real pains with ones that were unreal and harmless to our species. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness ... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. ~ Henry James

Read my book and you shall know thee ~ Oscar Sanders

The hardest part of writing a story is making bad things happen to good people. The hardest part of writing horror is knowing that it won't really get better for them. ~ Allison M. Dickson

I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep... I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts... and wishing it was otherwise does not make it so." Eiij'lam told the king. ~ K. Farrell St. Germain

For me, it doesn't matter whether it's a comedy, a Western or horror. As long as you've got a good story to tell, the genre almost doesn't matter. As an actor playing the role, it's all rooted in reality. ~ Patrick Wilson

We're not in a fairytale story. This is not a movie. Scriptwriters don't write our fates. We do. ~ Ken Marvin Ortega

The deal is this. You be the hero. Come down here. Unarmed. Come inside with your hands on your head. I'll let everybody go. Then I'll blow your fucking head off. Sir. How's that for a deal? You buy it? ~ Richard Bachman

But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers.
They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better. ~ Jack Ketchum

As an actor, whatever I get the opportunity to do, if it has a good story then I'm in. I thought 'Dead End' had a great story; 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' of course, was probably the first real horror film I was in. ~ Lin Shaye

The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the Spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play - which is the better way and shows the better poet. The Plot in fact should be so framed that even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one. To produce this same effect by means of the Spectacle is less artistic, and requires extraneous aid. ~ Aristotle.

The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan. ~ Stephen King

I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling. ~ Peter Robinson

constitute a horror story wherein the villains of the piece stole power from a stable governance system in order to cast the population of the world into an ongoing lab experiment with no plan or boundary. A dismal science. ~ Warren Ellis

Allow me to introduce myself... I'm the Countess... ~ American Horror Story

It's a long story, but one you've never heard before. This story is about a place that dwells on the mountain; a place where bad things happen. And you may think you know about the bad things, you may decide you have it all figured out but you don't. Because the truth is worse than monsters or men. ~ C.K. Walker

Drifting on the black, rippling surface were fingers. Thumbs. Dozens of them. Hundreds, floating like dead fish in a dynamited pond. I saw part of an ear. The lights went out. ~ Glen Hirshberg

I just wanted to make sure that yes, that those horror - they worked as a genre. To me, I just wanted to be touched by the film in the way that I saw plausible. Which is the story about compassion - giving and receiving it in those desperate times of need. ~ Vera Farmiga

There's no such thing as a limit on being the best. You can always go for more. That's what it means to be human. No... That's what it means to be me. - Claire Stanfield ~ Ryohgo Narita

The Tantric view is that there is already a complete Buddha dormant within each of us, but we've individually and collectively become addicted to horror movies that we mistake for documentaries. From this perspective, our whole society is caught up in a kind of shared horror story, imagining ourselves as zombie consumers rather than empowered citizens: afraid, insecure, incapable beings who have no choice but to wander through life grasping after fleeting pleasures, needlessly competing with each other instead of collaborating, isolating ourselves from the plight of those whose stories we don't understand. Because our whole society is both constructing and watching this shared screenplay simultaneously, the physical world begins to take on the qualities of this horror movie, and it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the theater of our experience from the screen of our own projections. ~ Ethan Nichtern

Horror is a reaction; it's not a genre. Somebody's life would have to be in danger for it [story] to be a horror story. ~ John Carpenter

The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that. ~ Christopher Moore

I love horror movies and I love being scared, but I don't like them, if they're not based on a true story. It's like knowing how the sausage is made. ~ Olivia Munn

They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. Everybody had jobs and there wasn't so much crime. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

There was a naked jock on my bed and a thing with tentacles coming out of my toilet. One of these things did not belong, and if you tell me that it was the naked jock, you shouldn't be reading this story. ~ Johnny Murdoc

Jergen Moltmann writes, End-time histories might better be referred to as exterminism. These are acts of military, economic, or ecological violence. Anyone who talks about "the apocalypse" or "the battle of Armageddon" is providing a religious interpretation for mass human crime, and is trying to make God responsible for what human beings are doing. Nothing has a more fatal effect than the expectation of a fatal future. These "cosmic catastrophe promoters" do not awaken the faith and hope of people. The only result is a general alarmism. What Christian apocalyptic intends is not to evoke horror in the face of the end, but to encourage endurance in resisting the powers of this world. Anyone who interprets the threatening nuclear annihilation of humanity apocalyptically as Armageddon is pushing onto God the responsibility of human beings. This is the height of godlessness and irresponsibility. This type of apocalyptic must be exposed. ~ Dan Boone

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes ~ Lauren Bradshaw

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?

A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don't limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You'd be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.

Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You'll never have fun being someone you're not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.

Also, don't be afraid to fail, and don't be afraid to walk away. Writing isn't for everyone, and that's totally fine. One doesn't need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction. ~ T.E. Grau

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction. ~ Elie Wiesel

It was a hideous ancient thing that stood on tiger feet in the middle of the floor. Like a showpiece. And he did enjoy showing it. He would bring his friends upstairs to the master bathroom so that they could admire the monstrosity while he told them the whole long boring story of how he'd gotten it at an estate sale in Hollywood. Some bimbo actress from the silent-screen days had supposedly slit her wrists while she was in the thing. 'Cashed in her chips,' Harold liked to say. 'In this very tub. ~ Richard Laymon

I'm a huge fan of Jessica Lange and 'American Horror Story.' I would love to work with her. She's been one of my favorite actresses for a while. ~ Anna Camp

Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from his mind. Lucretia needed a heart. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

You don't see heroism, humanity and hope like you do in a horror story. Horror celebrates the kind of friendship that keeps you standing shoulder to shoulder with someone even when the world is falling apart around you. ~ Alexander Gordon Smith

My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man - in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun - holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie. ~ Mira Grant

And I thought:History is like a horror story. ~ Roberto Bolano

His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.
(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James) ~ Herbert A. Wise

I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, 'You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

The table is silent again while we mull that over. Then Sophie reminds us that she dated a gay guy for two years.

"Dating sucks," I conclude.

"I got kicked out a guy's apartment once," Everly offers as her contribution to dating horror stories.

"You broke into his apartment, Everly. You stole his key and broke in. You're his dating horror story, not the other way around," I remind her while Sophie and Sandra laugh.

"Minor detail, Chloe. ~ Jana Aston

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth. ~ Maya Angelou

If you look into the face of evil, evil's gonna look right back at you ~ American Horror Story

I got very lucky to work with Wes Craven, very early on in my career, and continued to work with Wes for almost 19 years. I learned so much from him, and about his sense of story and his sense of horror, and that was great to be a part of. ~ Patrick Lussier

I remember the horror story that I told myself over and over again. I'm totally alone in my body. I'm totally alone in my head and nobody will ever see through my eyes. I'm just completely alone. ~ Sarah Silverman

It was true. She was his soul's star. His heart ignited every time she came into the room, flared with every just-so gesture. Anything she touched became instantly talismanic. ~ Mark Kirkbride

Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader. ~ Michael Koryta

Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening. ~ John Irving