Susan Hill Quotes

I've wanted to write a ghost story for years, and my main aim was to write the most frightening ghost story that I could think of.

Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.

'Dark Gods,' T. E. D. Klein's book of four novellas, felt like a godsend - even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks.

I believe things happen that can't be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.

There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax.

I like to dim the lights and talk about the ghosts I've known and invite other people to tell me their stories.

I'm a huge fan of ghost stories, that sort of slow build, the suspense and the questioning about whether you're imagining something or if it's real.

To the darkness and the night, the spirits seem to have a natural claim - it is their realm; the boldest of us have sometimes felt an unaccountable creeping in the thick darkness.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

Gory stuff can be shocking but it doesn't really scare me. I'd say the kind of stuff that gets under my skin is the unknown. You hear a knock behind a wall and you don't know what it is. Is there something there or not?

I fully believe in ghosts. I have, my entire life. The first house I ever lived in was haunted. There was a grave of a man in the backyard. I was just a baby then, but my parents would tell me that every night, at the same time, they would hear someone walking up the stairs.

I have never met a vampire personally, but I don't know what might happen tomorrow.

When I was filming 'Ouija,' there were some elements in that that really creeped me out.

But I do believe in the paranormal, that there are things our brains just can't understand.

Because it's in and about New York City, I knew 'Ex Machina' was going to have to continually mix the mundane and the fantastic.

Though they don't always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you've got to turn the screw very, very slowly.

Everyone has a ghost story, or at least that's how it has always seemed to me.

If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.

One way of grounding the magic is by putting in lots of stuff about street lamps, carriages, and how difficult it is to get good servants.

Paranormal fiction offers authors - and readers - the chance to answer the question, 'What if?' All the different ways that question can be answered make for extremely entertaining reading.

As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about scary demons, but I think that there are things in this world that are unexplainable that are mystical or paranormal. The possibility is there, definitely.

'Paranormal 1' scared me because I didn't know if it was real or what. 'Blair Witch' was kind of scary for the same reason. It takes the voyeur element away and makes you think, 'Oh crap, this could really happen to me.'

Those films that really speak to the primal fear that we, as human beings, have about the unknown have always intrigued me. That's the really scary thing, not the slasher, macabre movies. It's the ones that deal with the inner fear: the unknown realms and the mysticisms that are scary.