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"" Science is beginning to encroach on every level of our volition". And to me, that is a frightening social concept. It doesn't have anything to do with the right to have an abortion verses the right to life. It has to do with the ability of science to keep things alive and the ability of science to really control our lives."
"I write about things that scare me. I've never written a snake story in my life. I myself have never written a story about snakes because they don't scare me. I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me."
"I think it is harder to write a story that appeals to the intellect. But, when you tie onto one, you can do it quite deeply. It really depends on the type of idea you have to begin with."
"There are a lot of people in the field [ of horror stories] that I do read. There is a lot of stuff that is written in this field, though, that is not very good. You just have to look for the good stuff."
"I don't make movies. I don't feel that I have to have artistic control. Part of this comes from the fact that the book lives on no matter what Hollywood does to your novel in terms of a film. Now, you try to be careful who you allow to do your film because nobody wants their novel to become a turkey movie. But, on the other hand, it is a crapshot anyway, because even the best people can make a bad film."
"The first movie I can remember seeing was The Creature From The Black Lagoon. And, I can remember hearing a radio play of Ray Bradbury's Mars Is Heaven. And when I cut my teeth on comic books, they were not the easy ones of today like Spiderman, Superman and The Hulk. they were Tales Of The Crypt, The Vaultkeeper, and that sort of thing."
"I got letters from people that have had peculiar psychic experiences, experiences with the dead - sometimes fairly tranquil experiences and sometimes very terrifying experiences. I do believe that a lot of them are sincere. I do believe, also, that some of them may be misguided. But, I think the majority of them have experienced something."
"I'm not the first person to have said this - no writer ever feels that the execution of a book lives up to the idea for that book. The execution always falls short."
"Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that - while not perfect - is pretty spooky."
"I never have a thematic intention at the outset."
"I think most of us can remember from our own childhood, just in the Disney cartoons, things that frightened us profoundly. For me it was Bambi, the scene when the forest was on fire. That was something I had nightmares about. I can't imagine being a little kid of eight and seeing Night Of The Living Dead with living corpses eating the flesh of living people."
"When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was 'I've saved my life, but there'll be a price because I'll have nothing that buzzes me any more'. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been."
"I didn't go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it."
"Did it [cocaine] for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II."
"I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out."
"I like to end stories where the readers have a little room to run. They can resolve things as they like in their own mind."
"I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time."