Anthony Hecht Quotes

Oh, gosh, I have always been a huge fan of horror since I was a child. I know this is going to sound really weird, but I think it started with fairy tales.

Since I was a kid, I've had this morbid fascination with dark and scary subject matter.

I like the influence of the macabre, but I don't believe in ghosts.

I love ghost stories but I can't really watch them, especially not by myself because then I can't sleep.

I loved ghost stories, creaky staircases, stormy nights. If it guaranteed nightmares I read it by flashlight, after midnight.

People love dark stories because they take you to a place you think you don't want to go but really you do.

Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.

Horror is edgier. Dark fantasy feels mushier to me. Finding the difference - it's an instinct. And they overlap a lot.

I think probably the scariest thing, as weird as it sounds, was 'The Wizard of Oz' and the flying monkeys with the witch. I remember seeing that - it still seems freaky.

No real fairytale scared me, but Freddy Krueger did. 'Nightmare on Elm Street' scared the living hell out of me, but no fairytale. Maybe 'Hansel and Gretel' a little bit when they were walking through the forest and they met the witch. But I liked being scared, I really enjoy being scared.

I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep.

I think vampires are a timeless powerful archetype that can tap into people's psyches.

I like being scared, so I've always liked fairy tales because they're kind of creepy.

There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.

I didn't like books where people played on a sports team and won a bunch of games, or went to summer camp and had a wonderful time. I really liked a book where a witch might cut a child's head off or a pack of angry dogs might burst through a door and terrorize a family.

I was kind of a dark kid. I loved Halloween, and I loved vampires and the black and white old monster movies.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

I'm attracted to things that scare me, like 'Psycho,' my favorite Hitchcock movie.

We need horror stories for people to focus on.

'The Scarlet Gospels' does, by general consensus, seem to mark a new high - or low, depending on your point of view - in its excessiveness, in its extremities.

I loved ghost stories. I love horror stories. I love all of that stuff, but I really yearn for something to actually frighten me. It's more of a yearning for that than something that has to necessarily be cerebral or sophisticated. Good storytelling and something that actually frightens you.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.

I love the entire 'Constantine' mythology, the 'Dead Man' mythology, the Alex Holland 'Swamp Thing' mythology.

I didn't grow up loving horror.

There aren't that many monsters. It's very hard to create a new monster.