Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

My natural tendency is to write about zombie bunnies, but one of my first writing teachers got incorporated into my writing superego, and I keep hearing his admonition to make things feel more real the weirder they get.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

You become a great writer by writing.

I do love editorials - you're free to do whatever you want and portray a different character.

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.