Weird Fiction Quotes

#1. Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

Kelly Link

#2. Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read.

S.T. Joshi

#3. Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I'd say he might just be a genius.

Ramsey Campbell

#4. Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.

H.P. Lovecraft

#5. I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.

Brian Lumley

#6. I believe,' Muswell once said, 'that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us.
("The White Hands")

Mark Samuels

#7. Stupid dire warnings of imminent doom.
They always put me in a bad mood.

Clinton Boomer

#8. We all know interspecies romance is weird.

Tim Burton

#9. You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#10. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

David Foster Wallace

#11. No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.

Joan Aiken

#12. Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction.

Leonard Susskind

#13. I didn't look back, but I knew you were still watching. It probably sounds weird, but I could just feel it. The hairs on my neck bristled when you blinked.

Lucy Christopher

#14. Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again.

Michael Cisco

#15. I was that weird kid that checked out all of the non-fiction paranormal studies books from the library. I've always been fascinated by the supernatural, particularly movies and TV shows that manage to blend humor with the horror - 'Supernatural', 'Buffy', 'Angel.'

Molly Harper

#16. This one is for our crew, but it's also for all the weird girls and word nerds, for all the in-the-middle wickeds and queers and misfits and hell-raisers.

Laura Goode

#17. It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.

Brandon Mull

#18. I'm a science fiction author at heart, and what I like about the Cthulhu Mythos setting is that, at its core, it is horror science fiction. I can take ideas from modern theoretical science, manipulate them in truly bizarre and weird ways, and remain true to the Cthulhu Mythos vision.

David Conyers

#19. Magic, like Photoshop, can do just about anything ... but you have to learn how to use it.

Clinton Boomer

#20. Now that's a ghastly moon, not ghostly.

Anthea Carson

#21. Apparently loved did weird things to a girl's practical decision-making skills - Matilda

Devon Monk

#22. Have you seen The Yellow Sign?

Robert W. Chambers

#23. If there's one thing Robert had learned in three weeks at Lovecraft Middle School, it's that nothing was impossible.

Charles Gilman

#24. He didn't remember ever being less weird than he was right now. In fact, as far as he could tell he had always been more or less exactly as weird as this. if not more so.

Meg Rosoff

#25. I feel like science fiction can get a bad rap sometimes because people make something just to throw an alien in it or just to make it weird, and it doesn't really have a story.

Drew Roy

#26. People are slippery.
Especially when they excrete.
Or bleed.
Or fuck.

Logan Ryan Smith

#27. Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.

Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's.

Anthea Carson

#28. We had become a race of eccentrics and openly declared an array of singular whims and suspicions, at least while daylight allowed this audacity.

Thomas Ligotti

#29. ["The Devil in the Dark"] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn.

Arthur C. Clarke

#30. Science fiction fans are awesome - they love you so much that they'll watch anything you do, even if it's complete crap. I never dreamed that I would go to conventions and sit down and have coffee with a Klingon. It's so weird, but it's my life.

Katee Sackhoff

#31. I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.

Ellen Datlow

#32. Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience.

Michael Cisco

#33. I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.

Antonya Nelson

#34. There must be a dozen films now based on Philip K. Dick novels or stories, far more than any other published science fiction writer. He's sort of become the go-to guy for weird science fiction notions.

John Kessel

#35. Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.

Erik Meyer

#36. All that was left to us was to wonder: who knows all that is innate to this world, or to any other? Why should there not be something buried deep within appearances, something that wears a mask to hide itself behind the visibility of nature?

Thomas Ligotti

#37. Death. It was something I had to think about once. Weird, right? Strange that death was ever an inevitable end, but it wasn't anymore. Not really. I eluded it. Tricked it. It was an odd concept - the world aged, moved forward, yet I ... didn't.

Laura Kreitzer