Best 21 quotes of Stephen Graham Jones on MyQuotes

Angels, demons, sex. Heaven, hell, war. Blood and royalty, history and magic, fire and ice. And a story you cannot put down. This is fantasy at its best.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.

It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.

The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

When I am writing a novel, though, then it's usually three or four hours a day. Ideally, right after lunch until three or four, but sometimes picking up again around ten, going until a touch after midnight. I rarely write in the morning, unless I'm on deadline. I do like rewriting in the morning, though. Guess it's the way my brain's put together. Or, the way it's falling apart.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

Claire. It was the last candle left within the Indian Agent. The last glimmer. He curled himself around it to keep it alive, and when the storm inhaled he studied his right hand, could feel her beside him in the carriage that night and, as if he could insist on this, looked up the depression he was calling a road, for the cabman's blindered horse, huffing through the snow, its lanterns swinging. Claire waiting for him on the worn velvet seat.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

He stood over her for as long as he could endure the cold, long enough for the boy tending the dead to pass twice on fingertips and toes. The boy's self-appointed mission was to keep all of their eyes closed, the dead. Otherwise he couldn't sleep, the boy. But he never did anyway, as far as the Agent could tell. Any hour, there he'd be, scuttling from body to body under his calf robe. Many nights when the Agent locked his door, it wasn't to keep the Piegan from stealing his tins and blankets, but to keep the boy's hands from covering his own eyes.

Thanks Giving. The Indian and the White Man together. The pageantry spoke to me of civilization.

. . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter. But it did.