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" 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

Mind

Other

Heart

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

" 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. "

" There's no purer feeling in the world than being scared. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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

Sun

Home

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "