Quotes from Seth Grahame-Smith

I want to be judged harshly because that forces me to really sit down and focus.

If you write really good material, the rest just falls into place. There's really no trick to it.

It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while.

I think zombies have always been an easy metaphor for hard times. Because they're this big, faceless, brainless group of evil things that will work tirelessly to destroy you and think of nothing else.

I like my zombies slow and I like my zombies stupid.

I always say that the characters in Jane Austen's original books are rather like zombies because they live in this bubble of immense wealth and privilege and no matter what's going on around them they have a singular purpose to maintain their rank and to impress others.

My day job is making TV shows.

Let us pray now for the future dead. Though we do not yet know their names, we know that there shall be far too many of them.

I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts.

I would much prefer their minds to be engaged in the deadly arts than clouded with dreams of marriage and fortune, as your own so clearly is!

If you're Stephen King and you have a massive body of huge-selling well-respected work, you can pivot and do whatever you want. I don't have that body of work, I don't have that audience that's comfortable with me enough yet to follow my bliss with me.

I'm a big, bombastic novelist and thrill-ride guy. I'm never going to win the National Book Award.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

It was this weird confrontation of these two delicious flavors that got me consciously or subconsciously combining Lincoln and vampires as an observational in-joke with myself.

I feel like the luckiest guy on the planet. But, I literally work all day, every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and that's not an exaggeration.

put the car in "d" set the compass to "n" and get the "f"out of there

So I grew up in a very book-friendly environment and my education as a writer was reading. I think that's the best education. Reading, and taking from the people I admired.

I understand exactly what I am.

The bottom half of the page had descended into a doodle of a tiny man giving the middle finger to a giant, angry eagle with razor-sharp talons. Beneath it, the caption: To Mock a Killing Bird.

But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

...seeing the way his trousers clung to those most English parts.