Weird Fiction Quotes

A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil--of people passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices--of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray's rhythmic death--of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work--of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller's court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell--of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold the devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread! ~ A. Merritt

Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice's mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes. ~ Simon Avery

You know that jerk that drives up the shoulder on the freeway, passing perhaps miles of cars stuck patiently in traffic, just knowing someone up there, eventually, will let him in?
It's the same thing!
Someone always accommodates the pushy, petulant jerk!
Someone always lets that guy with the silver Porsche Boxster in and the rest of us, stuck behind the guy letting him in, have to suffer.
It's the same with people all over.
It only takes one sucker. One push-over to mess it up for the rest of us. ~ Logan Ryan Smith

Another time he woke me up in the middle of the night, lifted me off the pale blue sheets, led me outside to the stars and whispered: Look, Annie, look - there is no space for anything but dreaming. I listened, sleepily, wandered back to bed and
found myself wide awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to dream at all ~ Aimee Bender

Have you seen The Yellow Sign? ~ Robert W. Chambers

The Coach's head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes - they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach's only distinctive feature - for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon's beak. This snout - or beak, rather - was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man's face, it almost appeared - due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue - that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another.

'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and ~ Ashim Shanker

Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.

Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's. ~ Anthea Carson

When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird. ~ Erik Meyer

We had become a race of eccentrics and openly declared an array of singular whims and suspicions, at least while daylight allowed this audacity. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Now that's a ghastly moon, not ghostly. ~ Anthea Carson

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Such ordeals always strike one with their strangeness, their digression from the normal flow of events, and often provoke a universal protest: "Why me?" Be sure that this is not a question but an outcry. The person who screams it has been instilled with an astonishing suspicion that he, in fact, has been the perfect subject for a very specific "weird," a tailor-made fate, and that a prior engagement, in all its weirdness, was fulfilled at the appointed time and place. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Magic, like Photoshop, can do just about anything ... but you have to learn how to use it. ~ Clinton Boomer

No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true. ~ Joan Aiken

Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience. ~ Michael Cisco

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

Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing - the lack of anything of substance - made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part of
each human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder - the most appropriate response - giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil's claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived." He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… "I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?" His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. ... ~ John Claude Smith

Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I'd say he might just be a genius. ~ Ramsey Campbell

Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read. ~ S.T. Joshi

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness. ~ Kelly Link

On the other side of that big-ass mirror, a video camera was watching us. In about ten seconds, it was going to start spitting static at itself, and everything it saw was going to break up into a fuzzy, gray-white wash, rolling up and down, that wouldn't be admissible as evidence on Judge Judy. Those missing frames would last a little less than a quarter of a minute, consolidate themselves back
into a semblance of reality, and then I would theoretically go walking right back out of here.
Between now and that moment, there stretched an infinite ocean of potential
time. Time enough to walk around the world. Time enough to fall in love, get
married on a white beach under purple stars, write a book of poems about
truest passion, have a few good and bloody screaming matches, get divorced in a court of autumn elves and gypsy moths, then set the ink-stained, tear-streaked pages of your text ablaze. ~ Clinton Boomer

One senses that it is a region of cosmic antiquity, and that man is no more significant here than any other of the insects that crawl in the dust. ~ Mark Samuels

Dunce is completely bald and has a really pointed head so the temptation to get him paralytic on his thirtieth birthday, carry him to the tattooist's and get a nice big 'D' smack bang in the middle of his forehead was too much for me. Trouble is he can't afford to have it removed so he wears a big plaster over it. Gangs of children tease him.

'What's underneath the plaster, mister? Show us!'

They swear he has a third eye under there.

My name is Bill but Dunce calls me 'Fez' on account of my hat. I've known Dunce for over sixteen years. ~ Mike Russell

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books. ~ Mark Haddon

My breaths shuddered, still hot in my chest. I knew I had made a big mistake, but it was a glorious one, and I wanted to make it over and over again. But there was something in his eyes, something genuine and earnest and true that made me pause. This was more than just making the best of it, this was something taking root, a seed being planted. But it was a seed that couldn't be planted. ~ Mary E. Pearson

Hwang Jung-eun is one of the brightest stars of the new South Korean generation - she's Han Kang's favourite, and the novel we're publishing scooped the prestigious Bookseller's Award, for critically-acclaimed fiction that also has a wide popular appeal. She stands out for her focus on social minorities - her protagonists are slum inhabitants, trans women, orphans - and for the way she melds this hard-edged social critique with obliquely fantastical elements and offbeat dialogue. ~ Deborah Smith

We must find ourselves in fiction ~ HitRECord

I don't really have any gimmicks. I don't actually do anything that's strange. I don't even wear weird things. ~ Lana Del Rey

Every human being is a wet, gassy katamari of triumphs, traumas, scars, coping mechanisms, parental baggage, weird stuff you saw on the Internet too young, pressure from your grandma to take over the bodega when what you really want to do is dance, and all the other fertilizer that makes a smear of DNA grow into a fully formed toxic avenger. ~ Lindy West

Misery comes to miser; joy comes to wiser. (A Very Hot Cup of Tea, Empathy)
Juvenile invites, youth tries, adult applies, and the old man dies. (A Straw Man, Empathy)
In everyone, there lives a superhero. (The Medicine Man, Empathy)
Faith is the strongest word in any dictionary. (The Wisdom Beard, Empathy)
I've entered into your feelings; it's your turn now. (Empathy) ~ D.R. Mirror

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power ... ~ Ethan Canin

Weird itself, even in the dictionary, is just something that is different and unexplainable. A weirdo is someone who follows their heart. Im definitely weird, aint nothing wrong with that. ~ Kid Cudi

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story's silent twin. There are so many things that we can't say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.

Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-di ~ Jeanette Winterson

The lines in the corners of her eyes spoke of years of wisdom, as a tree with the number of rings increasing with each passing year. She was a small frame of a woman with piercing eyes that suggested that they knew you, understood you even. ~ F.C. Malby

I heart my job. I get to make things up for a living. ~ Michelle M. Pillow

It is only the sudden and unpredictable appearance of comets that spoils the immutable celestial sphere. ~ John Pipkin

Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign. ~ B.V. Lawson

I write adult fiction, but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers. I love that if they have to grow up and move past JK Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi! ~ Jodi Picoult

Shadows could be anywhere in blackness. (Eric) ~ Shannon A. Thompson

Oh my God, cheese burn! ~ Susan Bischoff

I have six sisters, so I assumed I'd have a girl. Learning I was having a boy was really weird. ~ Melissa Joan Hart

Whenever I'd go to restaurants, the main chef came out and was cooking for me, and he's asking me how the food is. I get, like, VIP service, so it's weird. ~ Inbee Park

I've never felt like - part of the entertainment industry. I still just feel like I'm trying to work my way in. And that's weird. ~ Kurt Fuller

In this age of consumer activism, pinpoint marketing, and unlimited and immediate information, we want the impossible: products and producers that will assure us that we are fashionable, and that don't pollute, harm animals, or contain weird chemicals, that run on alternative energy, pay their workers good salaries, recycle their scraps, use natural ingredients, buy from local suppliers, donate generously to charity, donate in particular to their neighborhoods, and don't throw their weight around by lobbying. (Or maybe they should lobby for the right causes?) ~ Fran Hawthorne

She told me I couldn't just put on a leather jacket and think I was rock'n'roll, I had to live it."
Burt about Bex, Book 1 "Making it ~ Jamie Scallion

I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over. ~ Stephen King

Fiction
at least for me
requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity. ~ Samuel R. Delany

I'm constantly embarrassed. I fidget and twist my hair and pull weird faces and stutter. Some days I feel quite confident, then others there's a microscopic flaw about myself physically, which will make me embarrassed to walk the streets. ~ Graham Coxon

Honestly, I hate Facebook - it has nothing on Myspace. I loved how weird and crappy and wild and trashy it was. Then there was the whole culture of pimping out your Myspace page. I remember spending 10 hours one day learning how to make our Myspace page look more like a message board from the mid-90s. ~ Alex Scally

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out. ~ Beck

I'm that weird guy; I hate being told what to do. ~ Jason Winston George

I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. ~ William Gibson

I freely admit that I took great license in writing 'The Dark Queen,' more so than my other historical romance novels. This is largely because I viewed the book as a fantasy novel as much as an historical. I do feel that writers should strive for as much accuracy as possible but, in the end, remember that we are writing fiction. ~ Susan Carroll

Take it from me: I really love making things up, which is why I write fiction for a living. ~ Kristin Gore

Big Eve had asked her to seduce Helios in order to secure a victory in the fight for his support & she had agreed to do so knowing full well that no action on her part would be necessary. Big Eve should know that all men were born animals, & as long as a girl made it known that she was prepared to accept a man`s advances, those advances would happen on their own accord. Her little experience with the male sex had taught her that. Thus, if she desired to seduce Helios, all she had to do was to make it known that she was prepared to accept his advances.[MMT] ~ Nicholas Chong

Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship.

But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in.

Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.'

Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees.

She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand.

She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor.

She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transport ~ Peter Carey

The reality is that I always envisioned the 'Riddick' franchise as a continuing mythology, so I always imagined that there would be many other films to follow. ~ Vin Diesel

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

As their figures recede, it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight. ~ Nadifa Mohamed

The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is. ~ Dean Koontz

Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists only so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody. ~ John Gardner

Day 72
I remember oranges and you don't mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you're touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the cherry-ness of them. On days like this, I want to take my strangers home with me. ~ Gemma Seltzer

Gossip ... is only fiction produced by non-professionals. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash. Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about losers on motorcycles- this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten. ~ Stephen King

Stop!" she screamed. "Don't hurt him."
"Back off!" Billy shouted.
She yanked harder on Billy's arm.
"He isn't a vampire anymore, idiot. Look! Do you see that big, yellow thing up in the sky? That's called the sun. It's shining down on him, and he isn't exploding. His fangs are gone. He's as human as we are. Case closed."
Billy stared up at the sky, his jaw slack. "Not possible."
Jack mumbled, "They don't call me Jackpot for nothing."
"What?" Billy blinked at him.
"Private joke. ~ Kasi Blake

Many great people had been considered to be boring, like Nigel Mansell, but anyone who had read the racing driver's autobiography, "Clutch Down, Dick Out", would know that perception was way off the mark. ~ Mark Jackman

To give herself a measure of credible autonomy, she had decided to invent a husband. Then, in a subsequent flash of inspiration, she had just as quickly killed him off. ~ Tracy Anne Warren

The Chinese went to their knees trying desperately to get their rifles into action, but the Mongols were on them too fast. Abusing their horses cruelly, they drove them right in among the riflemen, and men were kicked, stamped upon and died beneath frantic hooves. ~ Walter Kaylin

Celebrity is a weird appendage, which is useless unless you do something with it. ~ Minnie Driver

English. That was where I met him. ~ Andrew Koh

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true. ~ Javier Marias