Ray Bradbury Quotes

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.

When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.

I love all that kind of gothic Bram Stoker kind of thing. I love to get lost in that kind of escapism.

The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.

My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.

I've been a fan of vampire fiction since way, way back - I loved Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Shirley Jackson, lots of great horror and paranormal fiction.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.

I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.

Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

I've been a big fan of Joe Hill ever since his first novel, 'Heart-Shaped Box.'

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

I love horror, mystery, and science fiction, and Poe was one of the founding fathers of those worlds.

Interestingly, although the 'Books of Blood' were greeted with cries of righteous horror - and smirks - I didn't think of them as being particularly excessive. God knows what I did think was excessive at the time, but I didn't think they were.

I love ghost stories. I remember when I was about 12, I read M. R. James' 'Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary' under the covers, way too young to fully understand what was going on with those stories, completely terrified but absolutely loved them.

Edgar Allan Poe is amazing because he was so dark. He's from Baltimore and so cynical that you can feel it when you're reading, it feels so honest.

Ambiguity and the horror of possibility play a part in so many of my favorite horror stories: Shirley Jackson's 'We Will Always Live in the Castle,' Mark Danielewski's 'House of Leaves,' Victor LaValle's 'Big Machine,' Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' Stewart O'Nan's 'The Speed Queen,' and so many more.

I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.

My gravity is always towards original material but 'Gerald's Game,' I read it when I was nineteen years old, I got to the end and had gooseflesh up and down my arms and the back of my neck, I put it down and said 'That's one of my favourite Stephen King novels... it's also unfilmable.'

I tend to look way back for my inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe.

After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

I always thought it would be really, really cool to play Edgar Allan Poe, because when I was a kid, he was one of the authors who really blew my mind open to all sorts of weird dark and twisted places.

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.