Danse Macabre Quotes

“We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Some werewolves are hairy on the inside.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search. And what it’s looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. The work of horror is not interested in the civilized furniture of our lives. Such a work dances through these rooms which we have fitted out one piece at a time, each piece expressing—we hope!—our socially acceptable and pleasantly enlightened character. It is in search of another place, a room which may sometimes resemble the secret den of a Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition . . . but perhaps most frequently and most successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller. Is horror art? On this second level, the work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art: it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points. The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of—as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out. The Stranger makes us nervous . . . but we love to try on his face in secret.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happens to us when we were kids, but we don't.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“What’s behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone. It is paradoxical that feelings and emotions we associate with the “mob instinct” should do this, but crowds are lonely places to be, we’re told, a fellowship with no love in it. The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration . . . but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so... You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“All of this was well meaning bullshit. But bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald's secret sauce.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“This Land is mostly white space on the map...which is how it should be; I'll leave more detailed map making to those graduate students and English teachers who feel that every goose which lays gold must be dissected so that all of its quite ordinary guts can be labelled; to those figurative engineers of the imagination who cannot feel comfortable with the comfortably overgrown (and possible dangerous) literary wilderness until they have built a freeway composed of Cliff's Notes through it - and listen to me, you people: every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“And, you know, I hope you have some fun with this book. Nosh and nibble at the corners or read the mother straight through, but enjoy. That's what it's for, as much as any of the novels. Maybe there will be something here to make you think or make you laugh or just make you mad. Any of those reactions would please me. Boredom, however, would be a bummer.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“The resulting scrambling to get the next big shiver and shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid 70s, and more traditional bestsellers began to re-appear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools—to dismantle themselves.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Terror—what Hunter Thompson calls “fear and loathing”—often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal—if it hits you around the heart—then it lodges in the memory as a complete set.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Time is not a river, as Einstein theorized - it's a big fucking buffalo herd that runs us down and eventually mashes us into the ground, dead and bleeding, with a hearing aid plugged into one ear and a colostomy bag instead of a .44 clapped on one leg.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Language is play to most writers, thoughts are play.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“…no one is exactly sure of what they mean on any given subject until they have written their thoughts down; I similarly believe that we have very little understanding of what we have thought until we have submitted those thoughts to others who are at least as intelligent as ourselves.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“We must join hands like children in a circle and sing the song we know so well, that life is quick, time is short, dead is dead and nobody is really okay.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Ciò che separa l'individuo di talento dall'individuo di talento e di successo è un sacco di duro lavoro e di studio; un costante processo di affilatura.
Il talento è un coltello smussato che non taglierà niente se non è brandito con grande forza, una forza così grande che il coltello non taglia ma frantuma, spezza.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma- that becoming a writer is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force- a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Here is the final truth of horror movies: The do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. They are the barber’s leeches of the psyche, drawing not bad blood but bad anxiety . . . for a little while, anyway.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Which reminds me of something that happened at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. A UPI reporter asked me the eternal question: ‘Why do people read this horror stuff?’ My reply was essentially Harlan’s; you try to catch the madness in a bell-jar so you can cope with it a little better. People who read horror fiction are warped, I told the reporter; but if you don’t have a few warps in your record, you’re going to find it impossible to cope with life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The headline on the UPI squib that came down the wire and into newspapers coast to coast was predictable enough, I suppose, and exactly what I deserved for presuming to speak metaphorically to a newspaperman: KING SAYS HIS FANS ARE WARPED. Open mouth; insert foot; close mouth.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre

“Rather than going on and on over what is essentially the same plot of ground, let’s close our brief discussion of the horror movie as myth and fairy tale with what is, after all, the Big Cassino: death itself. Here is the trump card which all horror movies hold. But they do not hold this card as a veteran bridge-player would hold it, understanding all its implications and possibilities for gain; they hold it, rather, as a child would hold the card which will make the winning pair in a game of Old Maid.”
― Stephen King, Danse Macabre