James > James's Quotes

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

“Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass 'rules' than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed 'requirement' of a twist ending, going all the way back to H.H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such 'rules'.”
― David J. Schow

“Time snapped and Hagerty found himself speeding toward the woman in the straitjacket. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he pulled her off the corpse and held her at arm's length. He caught a glimpse of Kalish's face and the shredded mess where his throat should have been.”
― Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark

“I said I don’t want it in the house, is that clear?’ She turned and left. Discussion closed. I knew better than to argue. I cast a guilty glance over my shoulder at Aphra. She was grinning at me. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, Reg.”
― Nancy A. Collins, Aphra

“She knew that the only love her demon was capable of was self-destructive, cruel, vampiric, parasitic, and all the other words her best friends had used to describe Jerry, Alec, Christian, Matt, and the others whose names, faces, and genitalia had now blurred together in her memories. They were men incapable of love yet able to inspire suicide threats.”
― Nancy A. Collins, Demonlover

“That’s when his job got tough. Since that night, his shift had yet to go by without one of the inmates waking up with the night horrors. They all claimed the woman in Room 7 walked into their dreams. They couldn’t – or wouldn’t – elaborate on the details. Claude described the dreams to Dr. Morial, the ward’s on-call psychiatrist. Morial asked him if he liked his job. Claude let it drop. Life was complicated enough without trying to figure out why a bunch of loonies should fixate on a fellow inmate they had never seen. Or how they could describe her so well.”
― Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark

“But I can tell you the reason for me being so youthful-looking for a man a century and a half old. I’m not exactly what you’d call human. Hell, I’m not human at all. The closest thing you might be able to relate me to is what’s known as a ‘werewolf’, but not the kind you see in picture shows that sprout hair and teeth every time there’s a full moon. The truth of my kind is a lot more complicated—and frightening—than that.”
― Nancy A. Collins, Walking Wolf: A Weird Western

“I guess they’re having what you might call panic attacks. It’s an old place and smells a little musty. The hallways are sort of long and narrow. The exhibits are gory. The people are listening to some creepy, nasty stuff on their earphones. It apparently just overwhelms some of them, especially on a busy day when there might be some congestion in the rooms and hallways. You’ll have flippers, fainters and barfers every so often.’
‘It’s sounding more fun all the time.’ ‘Not as much fun as the heart attacks.’ ‘You get heart attacks?’
‘I don’t, they do. Not often, though.”
― Richard Laymon, The Midnight Tour

“Wielding a hammer, however, you’re at the very heart of the experience, being flooded with wonderful sensations that simply can’t be yours if you use a firearm. Now, you might be asking yourself how I came to discover the splendors of hammer attack. I’ll tell you. You won’t want to hear it, though.”
― Richard Laymon, The Museum of Horrors

“It was a hideous ancient thing that stood on tiger feet in the middle of the floor. Like a showpiece. And he did enjoy showing it. He would bring his friends upstairs to the master bathroom so that they could admire the monstrosity while he told them the whole long boring story of how he’d gotten it at an estate sale in Hollywood. Some bimbo actress from the silent-screen days had supposedly slit her wrists while she was in the thing. ‘Cashed in her chips,’ Harold liked to say. ‘In this very tub.”
― Richard Laymon, Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

“Things had gone badly at Hell House, although not quite as horribly as the '31 investigation. At least this time there were survivors, if you wanted to call being reduced to catatonia and raving lunacy 'surviving'.”
― Nancy A. Collins, Return to Hell House

“Smile while you can,’ Hettie Close had scrawled in ink almost as faded as the print above it. ‘Smile like the skull you’ll be, you fool, before you’re worse than bones.”
― Ramsey Campbell

“He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn’t this passage too short? No, it wasn’t a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him—then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.”
― Ramsey Campbell, The Face That Must Die

“Unlike the rest he had seen of the bungalow, the hall beyond the door was dark. He could see the glimmer of three doors and several framed photographs lined up along the walls. The sound of flies was louder, though they didn’t seem to be in the hall itself. Now that he was closer they sounded even more like someone groaning feebly, and the rotten smell was stronger too.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991

“He slammed the door and ran blindly down the corridor, grabbing at handles. What exactly had he seen? They had been eating with their bare hands, but somehow the only thought he could hold on to was a kind of sickened gratitude that he had been unable to see their faces.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991

“The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God’s sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991

“Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”
― Diane Arbus

“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding”
― Diane Arbus

“What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.”
― Diane Arbus

“You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.”
― Diane Arbus

“I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.”
― Diane Arbus

“If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.”
― Diane Arbus