John Darnielle Quotes

I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'

As a kid, I didn't drift into the comic world too much because I preferred to read fantasies novels and science fiction.

I'm a big fan of superheroes and fantasy and sci-fi. I have been since I was a child.

I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.

I think the big thing is that Stephen King is just a phenomenon, and when he came along, for the first time horror was suddenly considered a very commercial genre. It had always been around, of course, but now, the books had the word 'horror' actually printed on their spines.

There were no horror movies or horror books to speak of in the '40s. I picked the '50s because that pretty well spans my life as an appreciator - as somebody who's been involved with this mass cult of horror, from radio and movies and Saturday matinees and books. In the '40s there really wasn't that much. People don't want to read about horrible things in horrible times. So, in the '40s, there was Val Lutin with The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People and there wasn't much else.

I watched the Star Wars trilogy with some good friends of mine for the first time in a few years, I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies-one of those first mashup books-and then I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with my family.

Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

For pleasure, I'll read military sf, or Elmore Leonard capers, anything that's fast and fun. Otherwise, I mostly pick at books, without any clear focus.

Kids' literature now is dystopian, you know.

We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction.

One of my favorite stories growing up was A Wrinkle in Time. I loved that book. I still remember the image, so strongly, of all the kids coming out of their house at the same time, they're all bouncing a ball at the same time, and they all go back in at the same time. A Wrinkle in Time moved me deeply.

I have never written a book that I wouldn't want to read. The trouble is, I love to read horror, sf, fantasy, mysteries, hero pulps - romantic fiction, in the original, traditional meaning of that term, as opposed to mimetic fiction. But most of all, I love thrillers.

I read anything I could get my hands on: science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers. I even became hooked on the Bantam reprints of the old pulp novels from thirties and forties: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger.

When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.

These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.

This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.

Arthur Clarke says that I am first in science and second in science fiction in accordance with an agreement we have made. I say he is first in science fiction and second in science.

Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.

I like working on action films, and I like working on movies that are comic book based, or that have this theme, because they're things I watched or loved as a kid.

I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.