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" 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. "

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" 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

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" 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. "

" 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

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" Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas. "

" 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. "

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

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

Stephen Graham Jones

You

Only

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer. "

" Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think America would do anything through a drive-through. "

" 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. "