We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated.
You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.
When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’
And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.
I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.
I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.
I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there.
No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.
I’ve spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it’s “genre” and therefore can’t be seen as literature.
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.
We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics – trying to play a serious part in the world – to a culture that’s really entertainment-based.
But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.
Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.
The redness was going out of the light now, the remains of the day were a fading pink, the color of wild roses.
A short story is a different thing all together – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.
If something is accessible to a lot of people, it’s got to be dumb because most people are dumb.
Invitation to Dance- It’s a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom. But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark. May I have the pleasure?
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.