Inspiring author quotes on the topic of the craft of horror

  • I delight in what I fear. - Shirley Jackson -
  • Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym. - Stephen King -
  • As long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you. - Shirley Jackson -
  • What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me. -John Carpenter -
  • [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 -
  • The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. - H.P. Lovecraft -
  • I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I’ve inspired a few people one way or another. - Richard Matheson -
  • So where do the ideas—the salable ideas—come from? They come from my nightmares. Not the night-time variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious. - Stephen King -
  • We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. - Stephen King -
  • To me, the horror genre is the genre of non-denial. It's about admitting that there is evil in the world and recognizing that there is evil within us and that we're not in control and that the things we are afraid of must be confronted in order for us to relinquish that fear. - Scott Derrickson -