Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
Interpretation
The essence of your current story often lies in your past experiences.
This quote suggests that if one finds themselves frequently referring back to the past in order to make sense of the present narrative, it indicates that the core of that narrative is rooted in past events. It implies that understanding one's history is crucial in order to fully comprehend the current situation or story being told.
In practice
In a book discussion about character development and backstory.
Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
Once upon a time men were possessed by devils. Now they are not less obsessed by ideas
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.
In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
You’ll join me sooner than you know in a place with . . . no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound--where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky.
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