Literary Birthday – 22 January – Stephen Graham Jones

Happy Birthday, Stephen Graham Jones, born 22 January 1972.

Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

1. Inhale fiction, night and day. Soon enough it’ll come bleeding back out. (FAQ)
2. Everything makes sense if you look at it long enough. (Mongrels)
3. I think the reason so many of us are watching, reading, engaging with horror lately is that it has an end. Stories have ends, whether they’re good or bad, and we want an end to this horror story we’re in. (Writer’s Digest)
4. I can’t imagine writing a novel that I think is going to work. I only want to write novels that are broken at the level of conception, that feel like bad ideas, because then I have to become a better writer and get extremely lucky to make it work. And when I get extremely lucky, and I somehow become a better writer, I feel like I went somewhere. I did something. … I like to write myself into a corner over and over, such that I have to become a better writer to get out. (Writer’s Digest)
5. I do think that being a professor helps me a whole lot with being a writer, because every day, like here in an hour and a half, I’m going to teach a workshop, and I’ll be telling the students things, techniques, precepts. What I’m trying to do is instill in them a sense of narrative ethics, basically. I want them to care about story in a new way, in a good way, in a responsible way. (Writer’s Digest)
6. My big thing I always say is read outside your genre. It’s too easy, if you only like fantasies, to read only fantasy. If that’s all you read it produces an inbreeding or incestuousness, you know? Read books on nutrition, or Martian landscapes, just different stuff. That stuff is like burrs, and it sticks on your pant legs. You track it back to your home country, your homeland, and then it takes root and grows up into a weird thing that’s never existed. (Fiction Unbound)
7. What makes a monster good is their implacability; the fact that they just don’t stop. They take damage, but they keep coming, they keep coming, they keep coming. That’s what makes them terrible. (Fiction Unbound)
8. Loud music shuts up the critic in my brain; it’s the only thing I’ve ever found. Used to be, in my twenties, I would stay up two nights in a row and then start writing. That would shut down the critic in my brain because he needed some sleep. But nowadays I need sleep, too. (Fiction Unbound)
9. All other art’s this complete mystery to me. But not storytelling. Not writing. It’s what I can do, when I’m lucky. So it’s what I’ll keep doing. (Litreactor)
10. I mean, stories aren’t going to solve anything, I know that. But the right story told in the right way, it can start a conversation. It can ask a question in an enduring way. But you got to never forget to entertain, first and foremost. If it’s not fun, it’s junk, I say. (Litreactor)

Stephen Graham Jones is an American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. He is he NYT bestselling author of 35 or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are The Buffalo Hunter Hunter and Killer on the Road. Others include Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, and My Heart is a Chainsaw. He has won and been nominated for many awards. He has even been on been on Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado. Visit his website and follow him @sgj.bsky.social

Source for image: Author’s Website (Credit: Alina Art)

by Amanda Patterson

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