Quotes on Genre

What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.

When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

There's an anecdote that's really been sticking with me: To be a Black man in America, you are born into the horror genre. You are not safe. Period. Full stop.

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

I discovered the fun of genre is... you get to explore your fears, and you get to use the metaphor of the genre - whether it's a giant monster or a... 12-year-old vampire. Whatever it is, you can sink something underneath the surface and make a personal film under the guise of great fun romp.

I have a complex feeling about genre. I love it, but I hate it at the same time. I have the urge to make audiences thrill with the excitement of a genre, but I also try to betray and destroy the expectations placed on that genre.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.

Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.

When it comes down to it, the reason that science fiction endures is that it is, at its core, an optimistic genre. What it says at the end of the day is that there is a tomorrow, we do go on, we don't extinguish ourselves and leave the planet to the cockroaches.

Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate genre movies. They were real genre films, and they dealt, in a way like the Italians did, with the excess of genre, and that has been an influence on me.

I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.

If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.

I'm not shy about trying to find what truth there is in any genre, whether that be an action piece, a sci-fi piece, a small indie film, or a play. I'm open to it all.

If one horror film hits, everyone says, 'Let's go make a horror film.' It's the genre that never dies.

People say you're trapped in this genre. You're a horror guy. I say wait a minute - I'm able to say exactly what I think. I'm able to talk about, comment about, take snapshots of what's going on at the time. I don't feel trapped. I feel like this is my way of being able to express myself.

The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all.

I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.