Horror Writing Quotes

#1. My fear, as a writer, is that I am a curiosity. That I can only bring you this peculiar condition from far away, from outside, and if you look at it then it will mean nothing. So, I have to pretend it's more than that. Horror writing lets me do that.

Tony Burgess

#2. When I try to write love, it only turns into horror. Thinking about it with a clear head, feeling such deep emotions to some other person you don't even know is truly a terrifying thingI wonder if love isn't a manifestation of madness in some way.

Gen Urobuchi

#3. Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness ... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

Henry James

#4. Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.

Richard Flanagan

#5. His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.
(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)

Herbert A. Wise

#6. You name drop authors like other girls drop boy bands.

Danielle Paige

#7. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

Vernor Vinge

#8. I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

Stephen King

#9. The hardest part of writing a story is making bad things happen to good people. The hardest part of writing horror is knowing that it won't really get better for them.

Allison M. Dickson

#10. No amount of therapy can replace the joy of revenge writing.

Mylo Carbia

#11. If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick...

Barry James Hickey

#12. You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.

Stephen King

#13. I didn't want to be the woman who gave herself over willingly to the first man to notice her. I didn't want to be the stupid girl in every novel who loved without question and entered relationships that didn't make sense.

Destinee Hardwick

#14. I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

Nic Pizzolatto

#15. I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.

Alistair Cross

#16. 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

#17. I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

Zadie Smith

#18. I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others.

Eric Diehl

#19. I love a good laugh as well, I think that's so important in life, which is probably why I've dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it's the most special thing in the world.

Paul Kane

#20. While I was writing 'The Last Werewolf,' I didn't watch any horror movies.

Glen Duncan

#21. I wanted to write a horror story. But in some ways, I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.

Dan Chaon

#22. Charlie Marlowe never wrote horror, but somehow horror was writing Charlie Marlowe.

Ruta Sepetys

#23. Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.

T.E.D. Klein

#24. Fear is essential in horror fiction. Gore is optional.

Rayne Hall

#25. When one writes, there's the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.

Deborah Eisenberg

#26. Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can
plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.

Bentley Little

#27. Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

John Logan

#28. I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

Susan Hill

#29. There is no reticence nor any limit to a 'Majique.' Only the unwillingness of the mind to open itself to the limitless power of possibilities that exist within the unbelievable.

Rob Shepherd

#30. You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. That's part of the horror of speaking, of writing. There is nowhere to hide. When you try to hide, the spectacle can grow grotesque.

Maggie Nelson

#31. I spent years only ever reading horror and then trying to write horror - and deep down, a horror writer is still what I'd love to be. But it wasn't until I started writing crime that things began to work for me.

Paul Cleave

#32. I knew I wanted to work with Brad [Falchuk] and Ian [Brennan] again on something comedic, and we are having a blast writing SCREAM QUEENS. We hope to create a whole new genre - comedy-horror - and the idea is for every season to revolve around two female leads.

Ryan Murphy

#33. 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

#34. Writing is a lonely act. When two writers come together to write a horror story it can be crazy. You can't step on a mine and hope it doesn't explode.

Ben Oliveira

#35. I tell everyone who asks me about writing ... almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough!

Brooklyn Hudson

#36. Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It's like network television. I'm your local cable access station.

Thomas Ligotti

#37. The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization ...

Ellen Glasgow

#38. Writing tales of horror makes it hard to convince people that I'm a nice, gentle person. I love rainbows and wildflowers and butterflies and babies, and I wouldn't swat a fly unless it was diving directly into my fruit salad.

Diane Hoh

#39. For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction.

James Patrick Kelly

#40. It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.

John Wick

#41. But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

Charles Nodier

#42. 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

#43. Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

Stephen King

#44. Come now, I was not about to let that thing eat you.

Stacy Buck

#45. I write horror because I enjoy it. I'm endlessly fascinated by the supernatural, by death, by darkness. And, to be honest, I don't have much choice. This is the way my mind works.

Bentley Little

#46. One day I want to write a full-on horror book.

Christopher Bollen

#47. So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

George Stephen

#48. And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.

Benjamin Kane Ethridge

#49. I would say that since I was nine years old I've always wanted to write and direct horror movies and action movies. There's never been a time in my life where that wasn't all I wanted to do.

Jay Baruchel

#50. Great work doesn't make me jealous; it makes me want to work.

Glen Hirshberg

#51. I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.

Don Roff

#52. On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

George Stephen

#53. I never said you had to like it. You have to accept it. No regret."
- Clare Harding

From the current book in writing BUMPKIN by Lani Brown.

Lani Brown

#54. February 9th was HIS day. The day he always striked.

Mary Papas

#55. Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that's appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

Christopher Rice

#56. In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

Jorge Luis Borges

#57. I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

Jonathan Lethem

#58. I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it.

Sergio Aragones

#59. If you focus on the humanity of your stories, your characters, then the horror will be stronger, scarier. Without the humanity, the horror becomes nothing more than a tawdry parlor trick. All flash and no magic, and worst of all, no heart.

Don Roff

#60. In my poetry a rhyme
Would seem to me almost insolent.
Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter's speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my desk.

Bertolt Brecht

#61. We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable.

Vincent Price

#62. I like horror, but I tend to like it as seasoning. I'd get very bored if I was told I had to write a horror novel. I'd love to write a novel with horror elements, but too much, and it doesn't taste of anything else.

Neil Gaiman

#63. I write what I want to write. Period. I don't write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don't write suspense novels or thrillers. I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I'll just keep writing them until they do sell
and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime.

Bentley Little

#64. I live in different worlds. One world where I perform my duty as a part of society. My favorite is my world. The writing's world.

Ria Tumimomor

#65. 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

#66. We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we're dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.

Justin Alcala

#67. I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

James Rollins

#68. I like to make blank pages darker. It's this thing I do.

Rob E. Boley

#69. I don't really know if I'm writing the kind of roles that Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore would play. Jessica Lange on 'American Horror Story' is a little bit more my cup of tea.

Quentin Tarantino

#70. Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.

Michael McDowell

#71. I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#72. I've always had a fascination for everything surrounding things that are unexplainable. Not surprising that my first movie was a horror film, even though, of course, at the time I had no experience writing horror music.

Christopher Young

#73. I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.

Susan Hill

#74. The unknown characters of writing seem to be endowed with an evil of life of their own as though sentient, and fain would wrest themselves forth from the parchment and wreak mischief on whomsoever gazes upon them.

E. Hoffmann Price

#75. 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