Stephen Graham Jones Quotes & Sayings

But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear's going to eat you, a bear's going to eat you, and then you go about your day. — Stephen Graham Jones

In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D. — Stephen Graham Jones

People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely. — Stephen Graham Jones

With the Romero zombie, you usually did not have a reason for the infection, the plague, the virus, whatever it's called. — Stephen Graham Jones

Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that. — Stephen Graham Jones

You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake. — Stephen Graham Jones

Claire.

It was the last candle left within the Indian Agent. The last glimmer.

He curled himself around it to keep it alive, and when the storm inhaled he studied his right hand, could feel her beside him in the carriage that night and, as if he could insist on this, looked up the depression he was calling a road, for the cabman's blindered horse, huffing through the snow, its lanterns swinging. Claire waiting for him on the worn velvet seat. — Stephen Graham Jones

In 1984, when 'Nightmare on Elm Street' came out, not only was I twelve and couldn't get into an R movie, but I lived twenty miles from a theater. So my first experience of it was on VHS. — Stephen Graham Jones

Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions. — Stephen Graham Jones

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some. — Stephen Graham Jones

That night, though, Dick wakes up crying, but happy too, the bitter aftertaste of a happy ending in his mouth. — Stephen Graham Jones

I think America would do anything through a drive-through. — Stephen Graham Jones

If you're not a beautiful monster, then you're a villager, — Stephen Graham Jones

When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways. — Stephen Graham Jones

In the 40 years since 'The Amityville Horror', dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough - special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough - that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization's loyalty to the core story. — Stephen Graham Jones

In the old days, the boy's mom would have gotten a name for what she did: Shoots the Car Twice or Four Holes in the Glass or Doesn't Ever Learn or Can't Stop Fighting. — Stephen Graham Jones

Angels, demons, sex. Heaven, hell, war. Blood and royalty, history and magic, fire and ice. And a story you cannot put down. This is fantasy at its best. — Stephen Graham Jones

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused. — Stephen Graham Jones

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent. — Stephen Graham Jones

I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in. — Stephen Graham Jones

If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there. — Stephen Graham Jones

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom. — Stephen Graham Jones

We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please. — Stephen Graham Jones

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art. — Stephen Graham Jones

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice
blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page. — Stephen Graham Jones

In the fast zombie stories, it's not our humanity that is at stake anymore. It's our survival. — Stephen Graham Jones

Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them. — Stephen Graham Jones

My grandfather used to tell me he was a werewolf. He'd — Stephen Graham Jones

It was his punishment, to become Blackfeet, to be Piegan. To live on the reservation he'd created, the situation he was already leaving behind. To replace his own life with an Indian one, and thus know firsthand the end result of his policies. An end result generations away from last Winter, just so he could see the scope of what he'd done, that it still had traceable effect. So that, in a sense, he could be inflicting it upon himself.
He nodded, accepted this. — Stephen Graham Jones

He stood over her for as long as he could endure the cold, long enough for the boy tending the dead to pass twice on fingertips and toes. The boy's self-appointed mission was to keep all of their eyes closed, the dead. Otherwise he couldn't sleep, the boy. But he never did anyway, as far as the Agent could tell. Any hour, there he'd be, scuttling from body to body under his calf robe.

Many nights when the Agent locked his door, it wasn't to keep the Piegan from stealing his tins and blankets, but to keep the boy's hands from covering his own eyes. — Stephen Graham Jones

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go. — Stephen Graham Jones

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered. — Stephen Graham Jones

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all. — Stephen Graham Jones

My uncle Randall always had a book in his hand. He read in the car, he read at restaurants, he read when you were talking to him. He read lots of different things, but mostly it was Louis L'Amour's westerns and contemporary thrillers. — Stephen Graham Jones

Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas. — Stephen Graham Jones

The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately. — Stephen Graham Jones

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end. — Stephen Graham Jones

Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They're no longer the scary creature in the dark. — Stephen Graham Jones

Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real. — Stephen Graham Jones

It's important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for - again - effect. Because it's just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part's making them matter, making yourself make them matter. — Stephen Graham Jones

The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre. — Stephen Graham Jones

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write. — Stephen Graham Jones

Jeans and sneakers are definitely best for the haunted house. They usually won't let you in with a mask, even. It makes sense. They need to be able to tell who the rubes are. And, sneakers are good because the ground's uneven, and you're running and falling and stepping on the slower of your friends. — Stephen Graham Jones

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer. — Stephen Graham Jones

We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world. — Stephen Graham Jones

The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble. — Stephen Graham Jones

The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it. — Stephen Graham Jones

The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist. — Stephen Graham Jones

If the main character's not in jeopardy - physical, psychological, emotional, whatever - then you don't have any tension, and you don't have a story. — Stephen Graham Jones

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters. — Stephen Graham Jones

It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book. — Stephen Graham Jones

. . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter.
But it did. — Stephen Graham Jones

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas. — Stephen Graham Jones

If there's any better place to get stoned than a rolling box full of pastry, then they didn't have the keys for it, anyway. — Stephen Graham Jones

Unless it does turn out to be you, of course," Izzy adds. "Then I'll spit on your grave myself. Take you to the last house on the left just before dawn. — Stephen Graham Jones

When I am writing a novel, though, then it's usually three or four hours a day. Ideally, right after lunch until three or four, but sometimes picking up again around ten, going until a touch after midnight. I rarely write in the morning, unless I'm on deadline. I do like rewriting in the morning, though. Guess it's the way my brain's put together. Or, the way it's falling apart. — Stephen Graham Jones

You can't negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse - that's to eat us or our brains. — Stephen Graham Jones

Thanks Giving.
The Indian and the White Man together.
The pageantry spoke to me of civilization. — Stephen Graham Jones

Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back. — Stephen Graham Jones

With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity. — Stephen Graham Jones

I would highly, highly recommend seeing 'Paranormal Activity' with a friend or, better yet, a group. — Stephen Graham Jones

For me, the facts in anything are always secondary. You don't lie convincingly with the truth. You lie convincingly with being a good liar. — Stephen Graham Jones

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of. — Stephen Graham Jones

It was a good day to die, but nobody did. — Stephen Graham Jones

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel. — Stephen Graham Jones

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story. — Stephen Graham Jones

Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction. — Stephen Graham Jones

Joe Lansdale is one of the few writers able to write in whatever genre or mode he wants on any particular day. How? He doesn't ask permission. He just steps in, out-writes everybody in the room. — Stephen Graham Jones

And, if I'm to be honest here, yes, I did indeed stop trying, finally. But the body breathes whether you want it to or not. The heart keeps beating. Perhaps because it knows more than you do--knows that, past this experience, a whole new life will open up, and whatever infirmities persist, they can be dealt with one by one. — Stephen Graham Jones

Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s. — Stephen Graham Jones

You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it? — Stephen Graham Jones

Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer. — Stephen Graham Jones

Lindsay's right," Izzy says, collecting the leftovers. "Billie Jean is coming back for her. With a little help from his friends."

"So . . . so is this a horror movie now, or a teen comedy?" Brittney says.

"It's an afterschool special," Izzy says, Hoddering her head over to study Billie Jean. "Know what the take-home message is? Don't fuck with Izzy Stratford. — Stephen Graham Jones

Stupid girls run upstairs, stupid girls run upstairs," she's saying to herself, turning to pull Ben with her up the aluminum steps, Billie Jean just feet behind them — Stephen Graham Jones

When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more. — Stephen Graham Jones

There's no purer feeling in the world than being scared. — Stephen Graham Jones