Quotes of Interest

“Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

  - Dalai Lama XIV

"The intellect is a great danger to creativity . . . you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth . . . you must never think at the type-writer - you must feel . . . it should be a living experience."
 
- Ray Bradbury

“The people that don’t understand horror seem to think that all horror fans get some sort of sick thrill out of dark and disturbing content.”

- Charles Schmidt

“The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. "
  
- Thomas Ligotti

"What always drew me to horror was the fact that it was set in a real, familiar, and believable world. The best writers in the genre have a firm grasp of this real-life world and the people in it – who, by the way, are everyday mortals facing everyday problems. Then this world is disrupted by the injection of menacing supernatural (or psychopathic, or cannibalistic) elements. That equation can be turned on its head in all kinds of ways, but that’s the horror I fell in love with and that’s how I continue to define it. If half the cast of characters casually drink blood or turn into animals from the beginning, I’m not interested. And I’m especially not interested if they sparkle, okay? No sparkling, please. If you have to sparkle, get a room."
 

- Ray Garton.

"When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost."

- Chuck Palahniuk

"Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?"
 
- The Serapion Brethren ETA Hoffmann, 1821

"Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

- Tyler Durden [Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk]




 

"I would say it's safe to say that 'Horror' as a fictional genre, has claim to it's own canon. There is a definite history that can be traced back eternally, both orally and written and now multi-media based. We at this point, have access to the full gambit of 'genre' Horror in all its hybrid forms (electronically at least). Sub-genres ensure that Horror can and will multiply in its complexities and evolve along with human fears."

- William Cook

“Whether you’re writing about vampires, zombies, werewolves, demons, witches, ghosts or serial killers, the tone, the mood, the settings, the characters, and the plot should be so uniquely personal that only you could have possibly written it. That is the only reason anyone should ever write any story, ever, because you are the only person who could have written it.”
 

- Wrath James White

"Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion."

- Clive Barker

 

"Suffer the pain of discipline, or suffer the pain of regret."

"To Those Who Think,
To Those Who Dare,
To Those Who Do,
To Those Who Succeed.

Success is nothing more than taking advantage of an opportunity."

- Anonymous

 

 “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

 

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”

  - H.P. Lovecraft

 "There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the commonsense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already."

- Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson, “The Illuminatus Trilogy”

"All the best, for all the rest"
"There is no greater religion than Truth"
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” (§ 146)

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 

"A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part."

 
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true."

 
"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."

 
"What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!"

 
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
 
"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago."
 
"It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma... which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve."
 
"Never to suffer would never to have been blessed."
 
"Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again."
 
"Sleep, those little slices of death; Oh how I loathe them."
 
"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led."
 
"To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair."
 
"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."

- Edgar Allan Poe

 

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."
"Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself."
"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."

- Henry James 

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page."

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write."

- Stephen King

 

 "Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy."

- Dean Koontz

"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."

- Rod Serling
 

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
"In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man."
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

- Alfred Hitchcock

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie."

"This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day; Thou canst not then be false to any man."

"Have more than thou showest; Speak less than thou knowest."

"We know what we are, but not what we may be."

"In time we hate that which we often fear."

"Brevity is the soul of wit."

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't."

- William Shakespeare

 

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

- H. P. Lovecraft

"There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know."

"Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age."

"Conservative. noun. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."

- Ambrose Bierce

"We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow."

 "You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You're looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!"

"Sometimes I feel like a vampire."

"Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself–what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself–that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring–the strength of character–to throw off its shackles…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure that I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me–after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self."  

- Ted Bundy

"It doesn't matter what happens in your life.. even if you come across a wall so big where you cannot see the top or end of it! As long as you follow your conscience, have the willpower of an iron man, the determination of a ram, and the dedication of an ant! You will smash straight through that wall, and continue on to achieve personal victories in your life, growing your defenses even stronger. Not letting anything change your heart on what you feel to be the truth! Because whatever you set your mind to (that you know to be right), you can achieve!"

- Chooka Parker

Wrath James White, Chuck Palahniuk, Ray Garton, Thomas Ligotti, Charles Schmidt, Ray Bradbury, Dalai Lama XIV, Clive Barker, John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Shea, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, William Shakespeare, Ambrose Bierce, Ted Bundy, Chooka Parker, Quotes, William Cook