Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

Godzilla. The big, green G-man has had a profound influence on my creative endeavors and imagination since I was blueberry-avoiding kid.

I wondered how they would top the Pirates and skeletons and moonlight, because that's a pretty cool concept.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

Because some of my at-home life was rough and lonely, I often looked to escape into my imagination. Science fiction provided a deep well to pull from and was something easily accessible to me.

Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved.

The way people love sci-fi is how I love cartoons.

Kids need stuff which is different than what their life is that they can kind of live through.

From an early age, I had always loved drawing. Laying on the floor, in front of the fire, drawing from my imagination, marching soldiers, dive bombers, spaceships and monsters. Now, suddenly, I was drawing from real life!

In the end, all that time I spent in the 'Star Wars' universe fostered galaxies of creativity and made me a better person here on Earth, because it taught me that everyone counts. That's why I can sincerely and with a straight face say: 'May the Force be with you.'

I think it's also safe to say genre TV and movies were a big influence - the first stories I ever tried to write were Godzilla fan fiction when I was in elementary school, complete with elaborate maps of Monster Island made with multiple sheets of typing paper and nearly six feet wide. I kind of wish I still had those.

Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.

Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.

'Jurassic Park' and 'Star Wars' shoved me into loving sci-fi and film in general when I was a barely coherent 3-year-old. And 'Lord of the Rings' took me to another planet entirely. Before that series, I knew I loved writing, but after, I knew that I had to write.

I grew up watching sci-fi and Justice League and all those kinds of things.

I've always loved massive worlds, whether in fantasy or science fiction. I like the idea of making my own rules as well as utilizing everything that I love or inspires me. It's very freeing to know you can write a story that can be as big as your own imagination.

Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me pace and gave me a sense of action and adventure.

When I was very young, even before I went to what you call elementary school, I used to read and watch Japanese comic books and anime all the time. These were the seeds of my future.

I believe in adventure and imagination, and I got that from my parents and the things I experienced as a child.

Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.

I think that sense of wonderment, where you walk out expecting the ordinary and are confronted by the extraordinary, is something that has always interested me, whether in TV or comic books.

When I was 9, I saw 'Star Wars,' and it set me on a path to where I am today.

Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.

At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man.

I don't often know exactly what's coming next, and that makes it more fun. And you know, for me, this entire genre is all about that; it's all about having fun and getting away from the mundane world for just a little while.