Horror Writing Quotes

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too. ~ Susan Hill

Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable. ~ Michael McDowell

Deadlines help me, but my muse hates them. My muse functions in fits and starts, and tends to take very long vacations. Deadlines are like a hot poker to his ass. They force us both to sit down and write, which is what it takes to do this. ~ Alistair Cross

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

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said. ~ Jacob M. Held

When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I immediately knew that I wanted to write horror stories. I had read Arthur Machen before I read Lovecraft, and I didn't have that reaction at all. It was what I sensed in Lovecraft's works and what I learned about his myth as the "recluse of Providence" that made me think, "That's for me!" I already had a grim view of existence, so there was no problem there. I was and am agoraphobic, so being reclusive was a snap. The only challenge was whether or not I could actually write horror stories. So I studied fiction writing and wrote every day for years and years until I started to get my stories accepted by small press magazines. I'm not comparing myself to Lovecraft as a person or as a writer, but the rough outline of his life gave me something to aspire to. I don't know what would have become of me if I hadn't discovered Lovecraft. ~ Thomas Ligotti

I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms. ~ Alistair Cross

They want to be stimulated. They want to read something that can get under their skin and hang out there for a while. ~ Alistair Cross

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror. ~ Peter Straub

Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say ~ Jaron Lanier

My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my childhood. ~ Rani Mukerji

Since writing, I've learnt to truly appreciate COLD coffee. If the second or third sip is cold, I lost track of time and was in my groove. ~ Michael Kroft

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce. ~ Steven Pinker

I have a hard time writing music when I'm on tour. ~ Avicii

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form. ~ Robert McKee

Some days I feel more like a scribe than a creator. I will have the major points fleshed out, but there is always a turn or two that I didn't see coming, or which came earlier than I expected it to, or not at all... ~ J. Neven-Pugh

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing. ~ Roland Barthes

I can't be yours forever, Mab," I told her, the words flying into my mouth as if by magic. "I already belong to someone else. I belong to Alice! ~ Joseph Delaney

There is, I think, great difficulty in writing of one's self: it is almost impossible to present subjects where the chief actor must be conspicuous and not seem to be, or really be, egotistical. ~ Dorothea Dix

[...] She knew it a book it was not just a book. Everything had a meaning. There was an invisible web that connected the words. It was like magic ~ Ben Oliveira

The only difference between men and women in science is that the women have the babies. This makes it more difficult for women in science but should not be seen as a barrier, for it is merely another challenge to be overcome. ~ Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

I'm from Boston, and I get easily overwhelmed in New York, so I go to Boston and stay with my parents for a few months at a time to write, or edit, or just to cry. ~ Alex Karpovsky

Faced with a totally controlled, monitored and owned online world, in which every utterance is immediately scanned and filed away, many have yet to make the connection that the best solution may not be running Tor and eighteen proxies, but writing things down on paper and talking face-to-face. Remember the mail? Remember conversations? Yeah, those still exist. Want to shake somebody out of their online trance? Send them a letter. Send them art. Want to record something that will last longer than a few seconds on Facebook or Twitter? Write a book. The physical world didn't go anywhere. In fact, physical artifacts and experiences have only grown in totemic power the more we've pushed them away. ~ Jason Louv

I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it. ~ Alice Englert

To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture's uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents. ~ Martin Jay

You drive, walk, eat, look at television, read, and all the while, beyond you and the cozy circle created by your lady around herself and you, like the natural emanations of stars, other lives circle yours, seeds still winged and wind-borne, looking for sympathetic soil. You feel the juices and solids of your body in attempted rearrangement, or, more disturbing, making an effort to create a stillness that approximates death, beyond which the body does become soil, receptive to all wind-borne seeds. In a not especially prolonged stillness, as though no chances could be taken that you might decide to become perpetual motion, words fall out of the air, a random fall from which you might be tempted to make selection, and as you do not move, cannot, a string of words falls onto you, and from you, onto the paper: winter rye greening up, smoothing the old brown earth with a fine new plane: Carpenter Rye, neighbor. ~ Coleman Dowell

So even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end, love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly. ~ Shane Claiborne

We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy, and we should do it today while our economy is in the position of global strength, because if we don't write the rules for trade around the world, guess what: China will. ~ Barack Obama

For some reason, the concept of writing with swing chords was intimidating. ~ Suzy Bogguss

Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age. ~ Gunter Grass

What I like about being independent [in the music industry] is that anybody who does play the album on the radio and anybody who does choose to write in the media does so because they want to, because they like it or because they find something interesting there, not because they have to. ~ Ani DiFranco

Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you. ~ Victoria Sawyer

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience. ~ Jennifer Gilmore

The importance is getting to something truthful and in that moment can only be in that moment. I don't like to use the word "improvise," but it's a continual writing of the film. ~ Abdellatif Kechiche

I want to keep publishing books, and writing and spreading my heartsong through the world. ~ Mattie Stepanek

I realized I was officially a professional writer when all my plans began with "drink coffee" and ended with "take a nap. ~ Cassandra Duffy

I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them ... This has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own. ~ Judith Barrington

If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing. I'm glad I made this decision in a moment of failure. It's easy to say you're a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, the in is quite clear that it is not one's own decision at all. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today. ~ Nick Antosca

My writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything. ~ Michael Giacchino

Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn. ~ Graham Moore

The summer gig turned into my day job. I was an arts administrator who helped make indie flicks. At the filmmakers' encouragement, I tried shooting a couple of shorts of my own. Directing was stressful, it was not my strength. But writing the scripts and helping others with their scripts - that was a gas. Making stuff up the way I wanted to see it was the biggest kick I ever experienced. ~ Karen Walton

His eyes burned with intensity. I wondered briefly if someone
he knew was being held in that cold room that smelled like death. Someone he loved? ~ Jaye Wells

If you're selling information - and I have a lot of friends who write a lot of bestselling books and they're selling information. They don't need to have a picture on the cover at all because they are not important. They're secondary to their information. To me, the information is secondary to me. ~ Larry Winget

No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that. ~ Anne Waldman

Misunderstandings arise only in undefined relationships ~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

And I don't know where to find Ashley Danfield and all the other lovely commentators who show me live courtroom trials. To me, you know, I'm obsessed with it. Like I think maybe if I wasn't an actor I'd be a litigator. But, you know, it's always just shocking to see what happens in real life because most of the things that you see on those trials if you tried to write them into a TV series you would say oh gosh, no one would believe that would ever happen. But yet they always do in real life. ~ Debra Messing

I had the analysis of a million or so SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] just to see what was there. That's partly because I was writing a book about DNA and personalized medicine and I thought it would be a little bit disingenuous to talk about what could be done without actually having the experiment done on yourself. ~ Francis Collins

It's the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself. ~ Amy Hempel

There is no other even moderately equal abuse than the murder of little baby girls - nothing else compares with that, in horror. ~ Jimmy Carter

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the 'imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being - a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say 'Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,' the 'I' which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the 'I' which does the pronouncing. The former 'I' is known to linguistic theory as the 'subject of the enunciation', the topic designated by my sentence; the latter 'I', the one who speaks the sentence, is the 'subject of the enunciating', the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two 'I's' seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The 'subject of the enunciating', the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun 'I' stands in for the ever-e ~ Terry Eagleton

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it. ~ Alistair MacLeod