Top 69 Graham Jones Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I would highly, highly recommend seeing 'Paranormal Activity' with a friend or, better yet, a group.
Stephen Graham Jones
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Pretty much everyone on my iPod, I'd like to be friends with. But I'd say that the main two that I'd love to get into a conversation with, are Werner Herzog and Graham Hancock.
Finn Jones
#10. 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
#12. Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.
Stephen Graham Jones
#13. I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
Stephen Graham Jones
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. That night, though, Dick wakes up crying, but happy too, the bitter aftertaste of a happy ending in his mouth.
Stephen Graham Jones
#17. Thanks Giving.
The Indian and the White Man together.
The pageantry spoke to me of civilization.
Stephen Graham Jones
#18. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.
Stephen Graham Jones
#24. You can't negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse - that's to eat us or our brains.
Stephen Graham Jones
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. One thing that I always loved about, say, 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', is that Indiana Jones gets the Ark of the Covenant about sixty percent of the way through the movie. And then the rest of it is get-out-alive. To me, that's really cool. Because he's the one you care about at the end of the day.
Graham Moore
#34. People shouldn't go broke making a haunted house. Or, we should pay for our enjoyment, definitely.
Stephen Graham Jones
#35. Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
Stephen Graham Jones
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.
Stephen Graham Jones
#42. In the fast zombie stories, it's not our humanity that is at stake anymore. It's our survival.
Stephen Graham Jones
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s.
Stephen Graham Jones
#52. Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
Stephen Graham Jones
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
#65. Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.
Stephen Graham Jones
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
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