Famous Horror Books Quotes

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels. ~ Mylo Carbia

With Rodham, for instance, it has to work on an emotional level. It has to work on a character level. If it's only "Look, it has famous people," then it's a wax museum come to life and that's really boring. It's sort of like what they say about science fiction and horror where the really good ones, if you remove that element of it, it still has to work. That's the reason The Shining works or Rosemary's Baby or Blade Runner. ~ James Ponsoldt

I nudged myself closer to the ledge and closed my eyes and thought 'Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,' and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.' The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats. ~ Jack Kerouac

I can't get why people are afraid of books or films which are horror. What's the scary of the film "Cube 1,2,3" - Yeah it was brutal I get scary, but after an hour I'm fine. I just continue to live my life. I check out "Saw", the most brutal film ever watched, yeah I could have some kind a bad thoughts and other stuff about the film. Like to think that this guy "Saw", is there with the bike, but after few days everything it went on the right path. I had chance to see what is the real face of the killers - "Saw" and what does goverment do "Cube"!

GreenMile was a sad story, I still can't believe that Stephen King has written it! ~ Deyth Banger

Billy sipped the last of his coffee from the mug and shut down his laptop. 1,000 words wasn't great but it also wasn't as bad as no words at all. It hadn't exactly been a great couple of years and the royalties from his first few books were only going to hold out so much longer. Even if he didn't have anything else to worry about there was always Sara to consider. Sara with her big blue eyes so like her mother's.
He sat for a moment longer thinking about his daughter and all they'd been through since Wendy had passed. Then he picked up his mug with a long sigh and carried it to the kitchen to rinse it in the sink.
When he came back into his little living room and the quiet of 1 AM he wasn't surprised to find her there over to the side of the bookshelf hovering close to the floor just beyond the couch.
Wendy.
Her eyes were cold and intense in death, angry and spiteful in a way he'd never seen them when she was alive. What once had been beautiful was now a horror and a threat, one that he'd known far too well in the years since she'd died. He and Sara both.
He stood where he was looking at her as she glared up at him. Part of her smaller vantage point was caused by kneeling next to the shelf but he knew from the many times she'd walked or run through a room that death had also reduced her, made her no higher than 4 or 4 and half feet when she'd been 6 in life. She was like a child trapped there on the cusp between youth and coming adulthood. Crushe ~ Amanda M. Lyons

I was that weird kid that checked out all of the non-fiction paranormal studies books from the library. I've always been fascinated by the supernatural, particularly movies and TV shows that manage to blend humor with the horror - 'Supernatural', 'Buffy', 'Angel.' ~ Molly Harper

Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned ... ~ Clive Barker

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

From an early age I loved horror movies. I read books about horror, cops, firemen and military. Over the course of the years I started to see that there's a reality to this. The first movie I was really conscious of seeing was THE EXORCIST and I don't know if any of you have seen that but it scared the sh*t out of me. It really frightened me. ~ Ralph Sarchie

When I first heard of it, I thought it was a horror film. 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' is such a strange name. I wasn't into the comic books at all. ~ Judith Hoag

The villains were always ugly in books and movies. Necessarily so, it seemed. Because if they were attractive - if their looks matched their charm and their cunning - they wouldn't only be dangerous.
They would be irresistible. ~ Nenia Campbell

I was seven," she answered. "In my room, under the bed, I heard something like fingernails dragging across the floor. I got up the courage, hung my head over the side, and looked under."

"You're never supposed to do that," Mila gasped. "Seriously, don't you pay attention to the horror movies? ~ Lani Brown

This was like watching murder. Defilement. And it was something worse than either of those things. Even among his family, black trade as they were, books were holy things. ~ Rachel Caine

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost") ~ Fritz Leiber

I grew up really loving horror movies and genre movies. I was a big fan of Universal Monsters movies, read Famous Monsters magazine. I built monster models and creature effects. ~ Gregory Nicotero

I was standing amid floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in wonder and awe when my view of stories suddenly and forever changed. There were enormous piles of books lying in corners. Books covered the walls. Books even lined the staircases as you went up from one floor to the next. It was as if this used bookstore was not just a place for selling used books; it was like the infrastructure itself was made up of books. There were books to hold more books, stories built out of stories.

I was standing in Daedalus Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I had recently read Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. I was alive with the desire to read. But at that particular moment, my glee turned to horror. For whatever reason, the truth of the numbers suddenly hit me. The year before, I had read about thirty books. For me, that was a new record. But then I started counting. I was in my early twenties, and with any luck I'd live at least fifty more years. At that rate, I'd have about 1,500 books in me, give or take.

There were more books than that on the single wall I was staring at.

That's when I had a realization of my mortality. My desire outpaced reality. I simply didn't have the life to read what I wanted to read.

Suddenly my choices in that bookstore became a profound act of deciding. The Latin root of the word decide - cise or cide - is to "cut off' or "kill." The idea is that to choose anything means to kill off other options you m ~ Justin Whitmel Earley

Good horror is written by people who understand that fear is one of the cardinal passageways into the core of humanity. Good horror is generally written by folks who grew up on horror; books, movies, etc. You can't simply decide to write - in any genre - if you don't first have an understanding of the topic and a strong mental backlog of reference. ~ Alistair Cross

I had done magic.

Sometimes, when people in stories encounter the paranormal, they react with horror as the fabric of reality shreds and they are faced with the dawning recognition that everything they once believed was a lie. As I stared down at my phone, I had that exact feeling, except the opposite: not horror but a giddy, mounting joy. This was what all those books had promised. I knew it, I thought. I knew the world was more interesting than it was pretending to be. ~ Kristen Roupenian

Geeks are not the world's rowdiest people. We're quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint the
Emerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the 'giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight' variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill. ~ Angela Korra'ti

Books - the closeness of them, their contact, their smell, and their contents - constitute the safest refuge against this world of horror. They are the most pleasant and the most subtle means of traveling to a more compassionate planet. How will Boualem go on living now that they have separated him from his books, his most invigorating nourishment? He is like a plant that has been torn from the soil, separated from liquid and light, its two vital necessities. He has been excluded from the life of books. He has been exiled from all the landmarks of his childhood: values trampled, symbols corrupted, spaces disfigured and wrecked. ~ Various

[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue. ~ Dave Eggers

Many of my readers are women and some of them email me their thoughts about the stories I've written. Almost all of them find a delicious pleasure in being totally frightened by the strange and dark side of life. Perhaps it's because horror books are an escape from our sometimes-mundane lives? Or could it be that many of us actually do have a private darker side that we like to explore secretly through books, movies and music? ~ Sara Brooke

Eddie Carroll had just come in from outside, and read Noonan's letter standing in the mudroom. He flipped to the beginning of the story. He stood reading for almost five minutes before noticing he was uncomfortably warm. He tossed his jacket at a hook and wandered into the kitchen.

He sat for a while on the stairs to the second floor, turning through the pages. Then he was stretched on the couch in his office, head on a pile of books, reading in a slant of late October light, with no memory of how he had got there.

He rushed through to the ending, then sat up, in the grip of a strange, bounding exuberance. He thought it was possibly the rudest, most awful thing he had ever read, and in his case that was saying something. He had waded through the rude and awful for most of his professional life, and in those fly-blown and diseased literary swamps had discovered flowers of unspeakable beauty, of which he was sure this was one. It was cruel and perverse and he had to have it. He turned to the beginning and started reading again.

("Best New Horror") ~ Joe Hill

Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan's library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn't finished coloring either one of them. ~ Gore Vidal

One of the things I wanted to do with my own books was bridge the gap between 'Goosebumps' and adult horror. ~ Darren Shan

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it. ~ Christopher Paolini

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

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations! Shouts of delight and horror as the wonders of the world are discovered or the lies of the heavens are uncovered or the wild adventures of devil-knows-who sent romping out of the pages. A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong. It should positively vibrate with laughing at comedies and sobbing at tragedies, it should echo with gasps as decent ladies glimpse indecent things and indecent ladies stumble upon secret and scandalous decencies! A Library should not shush; it should roar! ~ Catherynne M Valente

I write what I want to write. Period. I don't write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don't write suspense novels or thrillers. I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I'll just keep writing them until they do sell
and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime. ~ Bentley Little

This book's like black holes.
It really engulfes you whole. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

There are the people who read my horror novels - the first two of them - and they found them scary or whatever, and then there are some people who are maybe not entirely stable who think that they're real, who think that they're being stalked by the same demons or ghosts that are mentioned in the books. ~ David Wong

Meeting writers is usually disappointing, at best. Writers who write sexy thrillers aren't necessarily sexy or thrilling in person. Children's book writers might look more like accountants, or axe murderers for that matter. Horror writers are very rarely scary looking, although they are frequently good cooks. ~ Kelly Link

It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called "tweenager porn." In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires - even zombies - but hardly ever became those things. It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn't hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em's computer. ~ Stephen King

...The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous "bubble letters" of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world - simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before - thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in a prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion. ~ Dave Hickey

In Stalin's famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number. ~ Alex Von Tunzelmann

I was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I'm making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I'd driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don't have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it. ~ Vito Acconci

I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books. ~ Clive Barker

In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part by far.) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I never - when I go into a project, I don't think too much about if there's a lot of other sci-fi books out there or horror books or whatever. I just tell the stories I want to tell, and I think that is evident on the page. ~ Jeff Lemire