Explore Quotes by William Peter Blatty

Well, the research into it affected me. And the novel, it very much strengthened my faith.

I'm not aware that I was consciously influenced by any director, though these things often happen unnoticed, submerged in the unconscious.

Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down.

I've been campaigning like anything for restoring these changes. For 27 years. I wrote a book about it, well, a portion of the book was devoted to these scenes and why they should have been in the movie.

I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea.

Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness... and perhaps even Satan - Satan, in spite of himself - somehow serves to work out the will of God.

I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural.

And the sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence.

I tried to make every bit of it as creepy as I could. And I had the same response you do. I feel the same way. The hospital scenes, that procedure was so real.

Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.

The terror drifted over georgetown like the sun over a blind mans eyes

I get cassettes near Academy Award time of every movie that's made that thinks it has some kind of chance for a nomination - that's when I watch my movies

Horror does not interest me, and so I know little of its practicioners, old or current

I lived in Georgetown in the late 70s about four houses down from the steps.

Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.

For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is a matter of love.

I didn't read The Haunting of Hill House until sometime early in the 1990's.

Procrastination is what we often call 'resistance.

When the filter is weakened by a powerful drug, what we see is not delusion but the truth.

But a myth, to speak plainly, to me is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn't otherwise swallow, like maybe lima beans.

From the cab stepped a tall old man. Black raincoat and hat and a battered valise. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless, staring at the house. The cab pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-sixty Street. Kinderman quickly pulled out to follow. As he turned the corner, he noticed that the tall old man hadn't moved but was standing under the streetlight glow, in mist, like a melancholy traveler frozen in time.