Quotes from Andrew Pyper

All my life I have been pursued by the black dogs of unaccountable gloom

Fuck you. You think this is a scene in some indie drama you take my wife to in the Village, some pack of lies the guy at the Times said was so naturalistically performed. But in real life? We're bad actors. We're slobs who actually hurt. You don't feel it, you couldn't, but the pain you're causing us—causing my family—it's destroying our lives, what we have together. What we had.

And this is the only really startling thing about the evil of the world: not that so much of it exists, but that nobody ever really expects it.

Grief has a colour. It has other characteristics, I know now, collectively forming a personality of sorts. An antagonizing figure that arrives in your life and refuses to leave or sit anywhere but next to you or stop whispering the name of the departed in your ear.

There's no reality but versions of reality.

It's strange. Hearing you say my name." "I can say it again if you'd like." "No, I'll remember just fine.

How do I shoot?" "Your finger through there. Feel that? But you only pull if you're sure that everything's right." "Why?" "Because you can't take it back." She

Don't be crude, Professor. Profanity is one contest you will not win with me.

But they are only the faces of the dead. Coming into detail as we hurtle toward them. They see us, too. Fingers scratching at the ice's rough underside, desperate to be the first to pull us down.

Some call it prayer. And as with all prayers, it comes down to either asking someone else to fight for you, or asking yourself to fight.

What's the problem? In a nutshell?" "I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.]

If it ain't broke, don't let some stupid fucker fuck it up sort of thing.

And what do we have? A profound if sexless intimacy of a kind I've never known with either man or woman since childhood, and perhaps not even then.

The dead boy floats by.

Though it's with you at every moment, it's always something of a surprise to discover that you can be at once alive and alone.

Don't stop to understand. You may never understand. Just keep going.

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? . . . Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. —Bram Stoker, Dracula

What I see as the particularly exciting prospect for writing horror fiction as we go forward is setting stories in more internal landscapes than external ones, mapping out the mind as the home for scary things instead of the house at the end of the lane or lakeside campground or abandoned amusement park.

Psychological horror is more interesting to me than the explicitly physical.

I just hated the law. I wasnt cut out for it. I couldnt imagine spending my life doing that, so I quit before I began.

Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go.

To make the reader afraid, I had to be afraid.

We need to kind of refresh our fear in order to refresh our understanding of how a safe place works.

Horror, for me, is not defined by the thing that provokes one's fear, but the human being who has contact with it.