Stephen Graham Jones

Quotes by 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.

  Read quote