Stephen King Quotes About Horror

Quotes about: Horror

• The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

  Stephen King

  Movie, Writing, Sisterhood

  FaceBook post by Stephen King from Feb 06, 2013

• We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

  Stephen King

  Inspirational, Funny, Fake People

  Stephen King (2011). “Danse Macabre”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

• For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

  Stephen King

  Loss, Dark, Gun

  Stephen King (2016). “11/22/63: A Novel”, p.791, Simon and Schuster

• When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist

  Stephen King

  Technology, Night, Ozone

• I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.

  Stephen King

  Thinking, Doubt, Classic

• He supposed that even in Hell, people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the full horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again.

  Stephen King

  Halloween, People, Appreciate

  Stephen King (2011). “Full Dark, No Stars”, p.396, Simon and Schuster

• And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.

  Stephen King

  Mind, May, Horror

  Stephen King (2014). “Pet Sematary”, p.223, Simon and Schuster

• I am your number one fan.

  Stephen King

  Numbers, Fans, Horror

  Stephen King (2016). “Insomnia”, p.689, Simon and Schuster

• There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

  Stephen King

  Doors, Darkness, Perception

  Stephen King (2016). “Skeleton Crew”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

• There's two kinds of evil that horror fiction always deals with. One kind is the sort of evil that comes from inside people, like in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The other kind of evil is predestined evil. It falls on you like a stroke of lightning. That's the scary stuff, but, in a way, it's the stuff you don't have to worry about. I gotta worry whether or not I'm getting cavities. I gotta worry about whether cigarettes are giving me cancer. Those are things I can change. Don't give me lightning out of a clear sky. If that hits me I just say, "That's probably the way God meant it to be."

  Stephen King

  Cancer, Fall, Sky

• This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination.

  Stephen King

  Imagination, Needs, Fiction

  Stephen King (2007). “Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales”, p.405, Simon and Schuster

• I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

  Stephen King

  Wall, Writing, Horror Stories

  Interview with Catherine Elsworth, www.goodreads.com. November 2014.

• The horror genre is an extremely delicate thing. You can talk to filmmakers and even psychologists who've studied the genre, and even they don't understand what works or what doesn't work. More importantly, they don't understand why it works when it works.

  Stephen King

  Genre Is, Delicate Things, Horror Genre

• I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Horror Stories, Guy

  Interview with Phil Konstantin, americanindian.net. July 1987.

• Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be.

  Stephen King

  Character, Games, Care

• Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" [sic] or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it.

  Stephen King

  Sex, Book, Gay

  High Times Magazine Interview with Martha Thomases, John Robert Tebbel, October 1981.

• I don't really get philosophical, but I believe that nice people are strong and usually in my horror stories, I don't like to write about the old standard where some rotten guy gets chased by a mean spirit that gets him in the end.I'd rather write about nice people that are menaced from outside by some sort of evil power and who sort of slug it out.

  Stephen King

  Strong, Nice, Believe

  Interview with Phil Konstantin, americanindian.net. July 1987.

• Carrie was a terrific piece of work. At the end of the movie comes, when Amy Irving kneels down to put the flowers on Carrie's grave, a hand comes up through the grave and seizes her by the arm. The audience went to the roof, totally to the roof. It was just the most amazing reaction. And I thought, 'We have a monster hit on our hands. Brian De Palma has done something new. He's actually created a shock ending that shocks an audience that was ready for a horror film.' And there were several people who did it after that.

  Stephen King

  Flower, Hands, People

• When it comes to horror there's a strange need to analyze. When "evil children" fad happened, there was The Exorcist and The Other and The Omen. People would say, "What this really means is that Americans don't want to have kids anymore. They feel hostility towards their own children. They feel they're being tied down and dragged down." In fact, in most cases, what those books are about is nice children who are beset by forces beyond their control.

  Stephen King

  Children, Nice, Book

• 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.

  Stephen King

  Horror Stories, People, Looks

  Interview with Phil Konstantin, americanindian.net. July 1987.

• There were no horror movies or horror books to speak of in the '40s. I picked the '50s because that pretty well spans my life as an appreciator - as somebody who's been involved with this mass cult of horror, from radio and movies and Saturday matinees and books. In the '40s there really wasn't that much. People don't want to read about horrible things in horrible times. So, in the '40s, there was Val Lutin with The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People and there wasn't much else.

  Stephen King

  Book, Cat, People

• I've been typed as a horror writer, and I've always said to people, "I don't care what you call me as long as the checks don't bounce and the family gets fed."

  Stephen King

  Long, People, Care

  "A Rare Interview with Master Storyteller Stephen King". Interview with Ken Tucker, parade.com. May 25, 2013.

• The advantage of horror books is to take the reader and cut him out of the pack and work on him one on one. It has its advantages because the people that are there in the movie theater really are a mob. If you get one guy alone you can do a more efficient job of scaring him.

  Stephen King

  Jobs, Book, Cutting

• The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated.

  Stephen King

  Fire, Littles, Deer

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

• By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more."

  Stephen King

  Writing, Order, Looks

  Stephen King, Tim Underwood, Chuck Miller (1988). “Bare bones: conversations on terror with Stephen King”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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