A Literary Critic Offers Some Tips for Writing Powerful Horror Stories

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, Jason Zinoman offers some interesting, although rather dated, observations: the book was published in 2011. Many of his observations could serve as guidelines to apprentices who are interested in writing a horror novel (or movie).

Jason Zinoman

For instance, Zinoman, in discussing Rosemary's Baby, points out that the film is “about issues that people could relate to—the nervousness of entering the real estate market; struggling in a faltering, sexless marriage; and the yearning, desperate search for fame (11-12). In fact, he says, the movie is “about the perils of domesticity” (14).

In addition, Zinoman declares, Roman Polanski “made the movie strictly from Rosemary's perspective and maintained that it must always be possible for “all the supernatural elements on it to be a series of coincidences” (21), so that “the suspense hinges on finding out whether the bizarre things happening . . . are real or the product of delusion” (21).

Throughout Shock Value, Zinoman insists that the cause of the bizarre incidents is best left unexplained and emphasizes the unseen, offstage incident as preferable to the seen, onstage incident in maintaining suspense. In fact, “in addition to the virtue of the unknown, the setting of an indistinct mood, and . . . rooting the magical or supernatural in a palpable realism” are “powerful ideas” (63).

Initially, horror movies were viewed as providing the audience with a catharsis (76), which 'assumes the audience identifies with the victims,” but Alfred Hitchcock helped to revolutionize this accepted view of the nature of horror films when he put “the audience on side of the killer in Psycho and repeatedly in the position of the voyeur.”

This twist causes the audience to identify “with killers,” rather than with their victims. As a result, it has been argued, this shift in perspective no longer allowed a catharsis for viewers; instead, it allowed “audiences to express their repressed sinful thoughts through the monster” (77). The monster became a surrogate scapegoat upon whom viewers could project their own lusts for violence, blood, murder, and mayhem. The movies, once masochistic, became sadistic (77).

Due to his upbringing in a home in which a strict evangelical faith was practiced, Wes Craven was more sensitive to “the allure of self-sacrifice” than many other filmmakers, Zinoman suggests. Craven understood that churchgoers went to church “not merely” to escape “pain,” but also to heroically “confront it,” which provided them a sense of “triumph” over evil (77). A horror movie could provide the same sort of experience, vicariously, for “a secular audience looking for the pleasure of masochism” (77).

Zinoman cites several films that accomplish just this task. Writing of The Last House on the Left, he states:

In a godless world without redemption [this film] . . . includes no struggle with faith. instead, senseless evil inspires just more senseless evil, adding up to a nihilism that invites no happy endings (79).

Religion and horror are alike, the author suggests: both induce feelings of “awe” as people are “shocked by their own helplessness,” but religion and horror differ by how they handle people's experience of awe: “religion helps you cope with this feeling. Horror exploits it” (92)

From Zinoman's observations, we can derive these story-writing tips:

• Make sure that the readers (or audience) can relate to the “issues” with which the story is concerned.
• Tell the story (or film the movie) from the main character's point of view.
• Maintain the possibility of both a natural and a supernatural explanation for the “bizarre” incidents that occur in the story.
• If a story is intended to evoke readers' or viewers' masochistic interests, focus on the main character's point of view; if the story is meant to arouse readers' or viewers' sadistic impulses, focus on the monster's perspective.
• After challenging the protagonist's faith, a religious story is apt to restore it through self-sacrifice that leads to redemption; a secular story is likely to end in nihilism, represented by anarchy and chaos.
• Whether a story is religious or secular in nature, it should maintain the possibility of either a natural interpretation or a supernatural explanation.

Zinoman also has some intriguing insights concerning John Carpenter's Halloween, but we'll save them for a future post.

Writing an Effective Title

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Ideally, like a movie tagline, an effective title should snare its reader’s attention, suggest the novel’s or film’s genre, indicate the type of monster or other threat, promise enjoyment, and have aesthetic appeal. Although it is difficult for single-word titles to accomplish such a three-fold task, it is possible. Pyscho is an attention-grabber, suggesting that the movie that bears this title is apt to be a horror film, indicates that the threat is that which to be posed by a madman, and promises a display of madness and mayhem. The Exorcist gets prospective audiences’ attention, suggests horror as its film’s genre, and promises an appearance not only of an exorcist but of a demon to exorcise and of a victim from whom to cast out the devil.

In addition to accomplishing the tasks of snaring the reader’s attention, suggesting the story’s genre, and promising enjoyment, a good title should be pleasing to the ear. Some examples of titles that accomplish this goal are Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (use of alliteration), The Bride of Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (use of allusion), and Stephen King’s The Storm of the Century and Wes Cravens’ The Hills Have Eyes (use of common phrases).

A good story title may accomplish other ends as well. Although titles may not, in so many words, express what is at stake in the battle between good and evil that occurs in most horror novels and movies, it may do so. For example, The Exorcist suggests that an individual’s soul is at stake. H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds suggests that the fate of the Earth itself is at issue. The movie Independence Day implies that liberty--a value sacrosanct--to the American public which would make up a huge segment of the film’s presumed audience--is in peril.

Other titles suggest both the nature of the beast and its habitat: It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Alien, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Most titles ignore the question of “Why?” (saving the answers, if any, to this bigger concern for the novel or movie itself) and concentrate on more immediate questions such as those which involve the agent (“Who?” or “What”?), the setting (“When?” and “Where”), and the method, process, or technique (“How?”). By reserving the answer to “Why?” for the story itself to resolve, writers maintain the suspense that, hopefully, their titles have created.

For motives related to the foreign release of films and for other reasons, the same horror movie may be released under two or more titles, offering one the opportunity to compare and contrast the titles with an eye (and mind) toward determining which seems more effective and why. Such an exercise can make one more cognizant both of more effective and less effective techniques for creating titles and may disclose the subtle differences in how various audiences perceive stories and storytelling and clues as to what may offend one audience but not another. For example, Planet of the Vampires was also released under the alternate titles of Demon Planet, Planet of Blood, Space Mutants, Terror in Space, The Haunted Planet, The Haunted World, The Outlawed Planet, The Planet of Terror, and The Planet of the Damned.

If a writer wants to pack even more into his or her title, he or she can add a subtitle.

A good way, of course, to learn what makes good titles is to study those of well-established writers and directors such as, in the field of horror, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, Bentley Little, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, James Rollins, H. G. Wells, Frank Peretti, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Craven, Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, George Romero, and Tobe Hooper.

A lot goes into a carefully written title because a lot is expected from it.

Categories of Horror

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

There are at least four distinctive categories of horror: the ominous, which features an unseen menace, such as a stalker; the eerie, which features that which is strange, such as a monster; the ghastly, which features the gory, the gruesome, and the deformed, such as a hunchback; and the frightening and shocking, which frightens by shocking.

Each category can be referenced by a cluster of synonyms that, perhaps, give a better idea of their meaning; some of the more common synonyms for each category are provided below, along with a few examples of each category, mostly from horror films.

Ominous, threatening, warning, worrying, gloomy, portentous, menacing, boding evil, ill-omened, unpromising, disquieting, unsettling, nerve-racking, distressing, frightening, alarming, bullying, intimidating, looming, startling, harassing, daunting, overwhelming

Ominous scenes include:

• The gathering of blackbirds in The Birds: Out of the blue, birds gather from miles around, many of them perching along a power line across the street from the local grade school, awaiting their opportunity to attack the young coeds and their teachers.
• Freddie Krueger stalking Nancy in the high school boiler room in A Nightmare on Elm Street: After staying awake all night, Nancy falls asleep in class. In her dream, she follows Freddie downstairs, into her high school’s boiler room, where the claw-handed pedophile stalks her in a horrific nightmare.
• The little girl saying “They’re back!” in The Amityville Horror.
• Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest”: As discussed in a previous post, this whole story is extremely ominous because of Stoker’s manipulation of his anonymous protagonist’s consciousness so that it is uncertain as to whether he is hallucinating or actually experiencing the bizarre incidents in which he seems to become involved during a hike in the countryside outside medieval Munich.
• Buffy and Faith walking down a dark alley in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Bad Girls” episode: The alley’s darkness, awash in crimson, suggests death and blood, and the flashing amber light atop the nearby construction sawhorse warns of danger. A moment later, sure enough, vampires attack!

Eerie, creepy, uncanny, strange, weird, peculiar, unnatural, supernatural, ghostly, ghostlike, paranormal, spine-chilling, frightening, sinister, alarming, mysterious, odd, bizarre, unusual, outlandish, extraordinary, irregular, abnormal, atypical, curious, eccentric, aberrant, perverted, twisted, deviant, mystical, ethereal, wraithlike, vaporous, indistinct, spectral, remarkable, surprising, astonishing, nonstandard, uncharacteristic, malformed, nonconforming, different, uncommon, intriguing, unconventional, anomalous, distorted, misused, tainted, altered, warped, cruel, bitter, unwholesome, numinous, otherworldly, unearthly, alternative, avant-garde, quirky, jarring, contaminated, stained, spoiled, soiled, infected, unhygienic, polluted, fouled, corrupted, changed, misrepresented, bent, deformed, pitiless, mean, unkind, nasty, brutal, malicious, spiteful, vindictive, merciless, heartless, ruthless, vicious, harsh, callous

Eerie scenes include:

• As A Nightmare on Elm Street opens, little girls, jumping rope, sing an eerie rhyme in a singsong fashion: “One, two, Freddie’s coming for you;/ Three, four, better lock the door;/ Five, six, get a crucifix;/ Seven, eight, better stay up late;/ Nine, ten, never sleep again.”
• The backs of a kid’s parents’ necks in Invaders From Mars: The sign that one has been possessed, as it were, by invading aliens, is a round wound in the back of the neck; a young boy, aware of this, is horrified to see the injury in the backs of both his parents’ necks.
• In The Shining, Jack, the caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel during its off-season, appears among guests in decades-old photographs posted in the lobby.
• A deranged family of misfits hosts a dinner for terrified captives in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
• A dog with a human head races past the camera in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Ghastly, terrible, frightening, appalling, horrifying, grisly, awful, dreadful, terrifying, horrendous, unspeakable, atrocious, shocking, gruesome, sickening, horrid, repugnant, macabre, hideous, outrageous, vile, deplorable, wicked, disgusting, beastly, revolting, nauseating, repulsive, gross, abhorrent, loathsome, ghoulish, ghastly, chilling, morbid, deathly, shameful, contemptible, despicable, evil, depraved, low, bad, wrong, immoral, iniquitous, sinful, impious, heinous, nefarious, fiendish, hateful, detestable, odious, unnerving, morose, gloomy, dark, melancholic, stony, dishonorable, malevolent, demonic, unbearable, unendurable, dissolute, dishonest, dissipated, decadent, debauched, unjust, irreverent, monstrous, scandalous, sleazy, agonizing, excruciating, insupportable, painful, degenerate, self-indulgent, profligate, unfair, unreasonable, impertinent, grotesque, ugly, wasteful, reckless, unwarranted, ill-tempered, impolite, brazen

Ghastly scenes include:

• The exploding head in Scanners.
• The aliens that burst through a human host’s chest in Aliens.

Frightening/shocking, startling, surprising, amazing, astonishing, astounding, staggering, disquieting, unsettling, alarming, fearsome, upsetting, worrisome, unexpected, unforeseen, unanticipated, unpredicted, remarkable, out of the blue, incredible, miraculous, wonderful, beyond belief, confounding, troubling, distressing, disquieting

Frightening/shocking scenes include:

• Jack hacks down the bathroom door with an axe to get at his wife in The Shining.
• A skull appears, superimposed, on Norman Bates’ face in Psycho.
• The viewer is shocked by the abrupt appearances of the monster in Jeepers Creepers.

The writer who uses these categories, in an appropriate fashion, will generate horror as surely as such individuals as Alfred Hitchcock, Wes Craven, Stuart Rosenberg, Bram Stoker, Douglas Petrie, William Cameron Menzies, Stephen King, Don Siegel, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, and Victor Salva have done in using these same techniques in their movies or novels.

Famous Writers and Director’s Quotes, With More or Less Direct Application to the Theory and Practice of Writing Horror

Ambrose Bierce

• Edible--good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
• Impiety--your irreverence toward my deity.
• Mad--affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
• Ocean--a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man--who has no gills.
• Politeness--the most acceptable hypocrisy.
• Pray--to ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
• Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
• The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
• There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
• To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
• When you doubt, abstain.

Ray Bradbury

• Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it. First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
• The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance--the idea that anything is possible.
• Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
• We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

John Carpenter

• Evil hiding among us is an ancient theme.
• To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
• What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.

G. K. Chesterton

• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
• A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
• All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
• An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
• Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
• Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
• Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
• It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
• If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
• Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
• Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a mustache.
• Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
• Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
• Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
• The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
• The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
• The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
• The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
• The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
• The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
• The simplification of anything is always sensational.
• The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
• The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
• The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
• Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
• There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
• Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
• When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
• With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

Wes Craven

• A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?
• I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.
• The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
• All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
• Easy reading is damn hard writing.
• Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
• Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
• The founders of a new colony, whatever utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
• We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
• What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Alfred Hitchcock

• Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
• Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
• The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.
• There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Stephen King

• I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
• It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.
• No, it's not a very good story--its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
• We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

Dean Koontz

• A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.
• Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.
• Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.
• Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
• I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
• I have been reading Stephen King since Carrie and hope to read him for many years to come.
• I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence--I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.
• I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
• If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.
• Never, never try to scope the market.
• Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
• Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
• The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
• Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
• We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another.
• The idea of true evil has been blown away.
• What we do as a society is seek simple answers.
• When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

C. S. Lewis

• An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
• Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
• Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
• Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
• If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
• If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
• Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
• Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
• The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
• The safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
• We are what we believe we are.
• What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Joyce Carol Oates

• If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
• Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
• Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
• Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Flannery O’Connor

• All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
• I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
• I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
• It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
• Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
• The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
• The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
• To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
• When in Rome, do as you have done in Milledgeville.

Edgar Allan Poe

• Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
• I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
• I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
• It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
• The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Anne Rice

• Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
• First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
• I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.
• I'm always asking questions.
• I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.
• Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.
• The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.
• The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
• Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
• We're frightened of what makes us different.

Steven Spielberg

• All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
• I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
• I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.
• You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project.
• Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

H. G. Wells

• Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
• Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.Some people bear three kinds of trouble--the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.
• The past is but the past of a beginning.
• There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
• What really matters is what you do with what you have.
• You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.