Horror Authors

"The United States is a nation made up of many very different sub-cultures (this is not even mentioning class differences). I have heard talk - largely from middle-aged white men - to the effect that everything used to be so harmonious and people so happy and what happened? - but they don't really want to know. Differences that used to be firmly suppressed in a hierarchy that was sold to all of us as "natural" are now busting out all over. When they take the forms of theory or morals (and even when they don't) it's impossible to argue them away. They exist. The Left (to which I belong) must learn them. We must all learn them. It's time and it's hard to do. I'm trying."

"Writing pays very badly. Writing pays very badly. Writing pays worse now than it did then. If you do it, do it for the love of it. You may even make a living at it and you may not. (If you do what Danielle Steel does, you probably will.) This issue is very American, i.e. the idea that celebrities have real lives and the rest of us don't. Publicity doesn't necessarily mean power or money and unfortunately believing that the "real" news is about celebrities leaves us all totally ignorant of the forces that are truly hurting us, and truly shaping our lives."

"At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner. (2. Bad Faith)"

"If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision," i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. As a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it, "There's less there than meets the eye." Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it. Mundane, realistic fiction often carries its meaning behind the action, underneath the action, underneath the ostensible action. Science fiction cancels this process by making what is usually a literary metaphor into a literal identity. (Introduction)"

"The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged. (11. Aesthetics)"

"In the field of science fiction or fantasy, morality—when it enters a book at all—is almost always either thoughtlessly liberal (you can’t judge other cultures) or thoughtlessly illiberal (strong men must rule) or just plain thoughtless (killing people is bad)."

"Perhaps it’s because I was brought up with no religion at all that I detest the science-fiction tropism towards re-writing Christianity from what one might call the village-atheist point of view. Although (Robert Sheckley's) “Budget Planet” and Fritz Leiber’s “One Station on the Way” are colorful and active enough, there seems to me to be no point in flogging dead fundamentalist doctrines so late in the day."

"Lady Sappho in curly gold letters is the name of the book I will (will not) write. (beginning of "Everyday Depressions")"

"This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when the Norsemen came. (first line of "Souls")"

"Writing isn't talking. God damn it. Look, James, this isn't going to be an easy letter. I'm going to finish it, put it in the Net, turn my signal off, and go to bed. I'll be asleep by the time you get up, so don't call if you decide to answer your red light or just go looking for something intelligible to read or know about (little enough here for either of us). I keep thinking of the impulses in the Net as sparks flying underground or undersea or bouncing off satellites; of course it's faster than that. It's already morning in Hawaii and this will get to you almost instantaneously when I depress the Transmit key. Which is a little daunting, the irreversibility. (beginning of "Bodies")"

"Duke Humphrey, bearded and humped, had died six hundred years before but not really, so that the people of Appletap-on-Flat were understandably frightened when he began to reappear in the outlying districts with (it was said) a demon cat from Zanzibar sitting on his hump and telling him what to do. (beginning of "The Zanzibar cat")"

"There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women."

"How multiform the universe is, how branching, how structured, how crystalline! Mountain ranges, clouds, trees, human relations, human literary inventions-how fractal they all are! (Introduction)"

"My mother's country: the body and garden of the Great Goddess, fair, ornamental, tended; I can wander forever in Her lap under the sun of Her face, in a cultivated place like the Botanical Gardens of my childhood where everything is suffused with the divine personality, regal, wide, and lovely. Everything's here-pineapples from Java, Norway pine, greenhouses like tropical igloos, the long wide lawns, camomile meadows veiled with hair, lawns that look like-and are-the dancing-grounds of angels. The fatherland is another place."

"most of the women in my generation who were doing groundbreaking work usually felt the need to find a way to distance a lot of personal, controversial issues. And while some awareness on some questions has gone up among the general public, so that it may be possible to say things out loud now that in 1965 or 1970 were certainly very tough to say out loud, in many ways they're getting tough to say again. Back in the early '70s, I shocked myself in writing parts of The Female Man. It scared the dickens out of me. I doubt that women are ever going to feel comfortable being direct, at least not until our society's undergone some changes of its own. When women try to speak totally directly, we lack the social forms or the cultural images or the permission to do so. These things just aren't in our vocabulary yet, so we still have to get at things in a roundabout manner."

"The amazing peacefulness, the astonishing lack of anger, the sweetness and balm of being at last on the right side of power. (p100)"

"Let's be for us. For goodness' sakes, let's not be against us. (p107)"

"In the summer of 192- there occurred to me the most extraordinary event of my life. (beginning of "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand")"

"Sex, when it's good (but how often is it that?) is like nothing on earth. So silly, so grand. So indecent, so matter-of-fact. (p95)"

"Sex doesn't last. (p95)"

"After she had finished her work at the North Pole, Jannina came down to the Red Sea refineries where she had family business, jumped to New Delhi for dinner, took a nap in a public hotel in Queensland, walked from the hotel to the station, bypassed the Leeward Islands (where she thought she might go, but all the stations were busy), and met Charley to watch the dawn over the Carolinas. (beginning of "nobody's Home")"

"Only those who have reviewed, year in and year out, know how truly abominable most fiction is."

"The point is to show how small the greatest of disasters can appear when seen from a distance of several billion miles or years."

"Courage is willful hope. (p86)"

"Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit."

"Anyway everyboy (sorry) knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That’s why they don’t pay you for it."

"Fucking, if you will forgive the pun, is an anti-climax."

"Dismissing the whole thing as the world’s aberration and not mine, I went back to bed."

"Houses stretched off on all sides, sometimes dipping below the ground and sometimes emerging out of it, piling themselves into pyramids, into almost toppling waves, never one rooftree more than eighty yards from the next. The planet was covered. There were the old, open-air cities planted with whatever would grow, mountains honeycombed, resorts in Antarctica, covered roads crammed with carrier traffic only, hovercraft, sea-craft, masses, structures, and installations under the sea, nets of algae towed in the air, some insects and no animals whatever, but people, people, people everywhere. What’s the opposite of the Garden of Eden?"

"“Rational people,” said the man, “realize that their lives must be made meaningful. Meaning isn’t just given us.”"

"How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil."

"Who's Elaine Beach? Just the one you'd expect. The shy one. The sandy-haired one with freckles. The unhappy one who isn't good-looking. The one who came back to town after a two weeks' absence, claiming she'd been to Chicago and had a baby. The one who's always listening to something else. The one who, on autumn nights, looks as though she can hear something else. The one who hates parties. The one who won't talk about it. The one to whom supernatural adventures ought to happen."

"The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the trouble with women, too."

"“And you think they’ll let you,” said Machine. It was a flat, sad statement. “No,” she said, “but nobody ever let me do anything in my life before and I never let that stop me.”"

"Sit a man on his ass with nothing to do but eat and the first thing that goes is his mind. It never fails."

"Alyx, the gray-eyed, the silent woman. Wit, arm, kill-quick for hire, she watched the strange man thread his way through the tables and the smoke toward her. This was in Ourdh, where all things are possible. He stopped at the table where she sat alone and with a certain indefinable gallantry, not pleasant but perhaps its exact opposite, he said: "A woman-here?" "You're looking at one," said Alyx dryly, for she did not like his tone..."

"He wished his imagination would not take so impressionistic a turn. It never fails."

"This is the tale of a voyage that is of interest only as it concerns the doings of one small, gray-eyed woman. Small women exist in plenty-so do those with gray eyes-but this woman was among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise. There is no surprise in that (or should not be) for it is common knowledge that Woman was created fully a quarter of an hour before Man, and has kept that advantage to this very day. Indeed, legend has it that the first man, Leh, was fashioned from the sixth finger of the left hand of the first woman, Loh, and that is why women have only five fingers on the left hand. The lady with whom we concern ourselves in this story had all her six fingers, and what is more, they all worked."

"There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress."

"I wrote 87 Goosebumps books. That's a lot of books for a human, isn't it? None of us expected what happened with Goosebumps. We started it in 1992, and by 1994, I was turning out a Goosebumps a month, and it was doing okay for a while. And then it just took off like nothing we'd ever seen. It took off all over the world – not through advertising, hype, or promotions – but just kids telling kids. There's some kind of secret kids network out there. Just kids telling kids about it, and this thing grew everywhere. It was in 28 languages. At one point, after a couple years, we were selling 4 million Goosebumps books a month."

"Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn't believe it. When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I'd already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up."

"There’s a worm at the heart of the world, eating itself. Did you know that? It’s true. And with each bite it does itself injury. Kills itself a little more. Digests another mouthful of its own intestine. Its howls are muffled by its body. But, being as it’s at the heart of the world, people still hear it. They get driven mad from listening to the damn thing eat itself. They want to make it stop so they won’t have to hear it anymore. And the way you kill what’s at the heart of the world is, you kill the world. Tell me you don’t know the people I’m talking about."

"If I saw something once that I can't explain, that doesn't make them real. And if a trick of the dark gave me a chill, that doesn't make them real. And if a madman says what's at the core of us all is a senseless, flapping quiver of black shade, that's just one more reason not to believe."

"A gun and a smoke. Ask for more, you're a greedy bastard."

"Women. You tell me they're not all witches, and I'll tell you you haven't been paying attention."

"One day, when I am a braver man, I will tell her these things, and then I will look her in the eye tell her I love her and ask her to be only mine. But until that day, we're just friends."

"“I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”"

"Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable."

"I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change."

"It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition so not war at all really but something more pathological."