Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can't write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.

'Feed' is about zombies and politics and blogging. It's about how George Romero actually saved the world! It's 'Night Of The Living Dead' meets 'The West Wing.'

Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.

My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I'm pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

Human nature, in which the laws of politics have their roots, has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India, and Greece endeavored to discover those laws.

We can't solve any problem without first solving the problem of human nature

'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.

Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That didn't mean he was cruel; there's no evidence he kicked puppies just for the fun of it. Similarly, 'Black Mirror' likes to examine possible dystopias, but that doesn't mean the show is cynical enough to endorse them.

'Night of the Living Dead,' then 'Dawn of the Dead' is a few weeks later, 'Day of the Dead' months later, and 'Land of the Dead' is three years later. Each one spoke about a different decade and was stylistically different.

The realm of 'The 100,' it's pretty complicated. I don't know. My mom never knows what's going on.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.

One of my pleasures is observing people's behavior and pointing out the inconsistencies that we all sort of have at the center of our lives.

I don't know what it is about these post-apocalyptic movies where it's like... people really want to see what happens and know what goes on in people's minds when they lose everything. With nothing left of what we had, do people revert back to animals or stay civilized?

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.

Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another.

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

It's not that big a mystery about types. It's not even that big a mystery why so many people are picking up on things now. It's like we were talking about the primitive thing before and all that. Nothing has really changed much. The things that have changed are like we're on the noon now. There are more buildings now. But we're still basically two monkeys sitting here.

Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.

Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, But vindicate the ways of God to man.