Horror Author Quotes & Sayings

...I've never understood the logic that says a work doesn't need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I've also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer. — Glen Hirshberg

I taught myself how to pole vault in one day. The next day I entered a meet to pole vault and won it all for the state of Alabama. — Bo Jackson

She wished she knew, and not knowing made it somehow much, much worse. — Sam Sisavath

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

We are more capable of turning around our global health crisis than we think. — Kris Carr

Be silent and safe - silence never betrays you;
Be true to your word and your work and your friend;
Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,
Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.
James Jeffery Roche — James McAllister

You Can't Replace A Star with A Lightbulb — Latif Mercado

Dogs are like kids. Cats are like roommates. — Oliver Gaspirtz

No amount of therapy can replace the joy of revenge writing. — Mylo Carbia

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

I'm a science fiction author at heart, and what I like about the Cthulhu Mythos setting is that, at its core, it is horror science fiction. I can take ideas from modern theoretical science, manipulate them in truly bizarre and weird ways, and remain true to the Cthulhu Mythos vision. — David Conyers

I grew up hunting with shotguns and rifles, and we had a gun in every corner of the living room. I'm not a gun advocate, but that's the way I grew up. — Anson Mount

As a writer, I will go down any dark alley, inch my way through the tightest crawl space, and feed on your every fear. I will take your sense of calm and tear it to shreds. - Horror Author Barbara Watkins — Barbara Watkins

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

It would be very hard to write a serious drama and say some of these things. You can be much more abstract and allusive with horror, and it's very forgiving to the author. You don't necessarily have to take an absolutely positive position. You can just write whatever. — George A. Romero

Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'
A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'
You enjoy this duty?'
He nodded.
I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here. — Roger Zelazny

Any writer of horror needs to at least have a good, solid love of the genre. Also, good horror writers need to have a slightly twisted sense of humor. Without humor, horror just isn't as good. — Alistair Cross

The name Maldoror, suggesting as it does evil, gold, horror, dawn, sadness etc., seems a curious hybrid, but on reading the work its full title, Les Chants de Maldoror par Le Comte de Lautreamont, seems to contain & imply the constant switches in narrative emphasis-the self as a game (je-jeu) & the author as observer, participant & invisible man-as well as being an inevitable & accurate condensation of, or hint at, the contents. — Alexis Lykiard

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something ... almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. — Steve Jobs

Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known. — T.E. Lawrence

But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. — G.K. Chesterton

I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee. — Alfred Nestor

My image is who I am, but not what I write. — Brian M.W.

This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn't look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression — Stephen Richards

Freeman looked up and grinned. "Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: 'The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.' Superb nonsense." Karl snorted. "Why are you reading such stuff?" "It's a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow." Karl — Gregory Benford

I've always been shocked that people that I'm actually flying with say, 'Oh, I feel safer on the plane with you.' I'm thinking, 'You must not watch the show because everybody around me gets killed.' — Kiefer Sutherland

It ain't the blows we're dealt that matter, but the ones we survive. — Stephen King

You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what every woman went through. Not that they got ripped apart, but they had no guarantees about whether they were going to live through it or not.
You know, I recently read - and I don't read nonfiction, generally - Becoming Jane Austen. That's the one subject that would get me to go out and read nonfiction. And the author's conclusion was that one of the reason's Jane Austen might not have married when she did have the opportunity ... well, she watched her very dear nieces and friends die in childbirth! And it was like a death sentence: You get married and you will have children. You have children and you will die. (Laughs) I mean, it was a terrifying world. — Stephenie Meyer

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. — Julio Cortazar

For god sake, open your eyes...the truth is crimes are real... the trouble is real... the horror is real... OPEN THE FUCKING EYES, you have freedom of speech, freedom do go to jail... My favourite characters are this in the jail!

If you ask me with what I will open my eyes, my answer is with the critical edition

The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition
by Fred A. Leuchter, The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, The Common Sense by Thomas Paine — Deyth Banger

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

Show me what you can do; don't tell me what you can do. — John Wooden

If you work in The Dark, you MUST live in The Light. — Mylo Carbia

A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from what is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon. — Clement Greenberg

I love horror movies. I consider myself a horror author, sometimes. — Nick Antosca