Quotes About Horror Writers

#1. Now quit your bellyaching and dance with me, you subaquatic fool. - Susan, to Gordon (The Horror Writers' Halloween Ball)

Derek Landy

#2. James Patterson, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, so far these are the best horror writers, but I will continue searching for other interesting horror and twisted writers even like James Wan.

Deyth Banger

#3. Any writer of horror needs to at least have a good, solid love of the genre. Also, good horror writers need to have a slightly twisted sense of humor. Without humor, horror just isn't as good.

Alistair Cross

#4. I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.

Christopher Moore

#5. Horror writers are specialists in the worst-case scenario.

Richard Laymon

#6. 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

#7. I am eternal. I am the night. I am the day. I am forever. And who are you?"
"I'm Skulduggery Pleasant."
"Oh, hell.
(The Horror Writers' Halloween Ball)

Derek Landy

#8. The Horror Writers Podcast, horror is awesome check out them.

Deyth Banger

#9. Horror writers shouldn't play nice. Disturb & unnerve your reader. Make them uncomfortable, but not so much they stop reading.

Pamela Morris

#10. I started out with almost entirely black fans except for a little handful of people in the horror writers' community, and those people really liked horror, you know. They will go to any lengths and read whomever they can find because they like that feeling of being scared.

Tananarive Due

#11. (Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

Howard Kerr

#12. Around 2008 when the writers' strike happened, all my stuff was getting stuck in development, and I thought, 'I'm going to try my hand at horror because I always loved it as a kid.'

Drew Daywalt

#13. 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

#14. I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies.

Poppy Z. Brite

#15. If you work in The Dark, you MUST live in The Light.

Mylo Carbia

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

Mylo Carbia

#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. Be glad that I'm not a horror writer, some people write about it, other make images... but third just create it??? As for me, I have create it from horror up to nightmares!

Deyth Banger

#19. I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.

Laura Lippman

#20. People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

Alain De Botton

#21. Edgar Allan Poe is considered the great writer of horror stories, perhaps the greatest - I will say the greatest

William Friedkin

#22. Horror fans are very passionate people, and they are very much into the 'Saw' thing. So they watch sometimes as carefully as the writers and producers do, in terms of the way the story plays out.

Tobin Bell

#23. 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

#24. I do not love men: I love what devours them.

Andre Gide

#25. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

Flannery O'Connor

#26. 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

#27. There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do.

Wes Craven

#28. 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

#29. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Charles Baudelaire

#30. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)

Emma Thompson