Robert Bloch > Quotes

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.”
― Robert Bloch

“I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
― Robert Bloch

“Funny how we take it for granted that we know all there is to know about another person, just because we see them frequently or because of some strong emotional tie.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Horror is the removal of masks.”
― Robert Bloch

“Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.”
― Robert Bloch

“So I had this problem -- work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer.”
― Robert Bloch

“We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Magic--that's just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn't so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“That's the way girls were--they always laughed. Because they were bitches.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“We all go a little mad sometimes.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“She was the only one left, and she was real.
To be the only one, and to know that you are real - that's sanity, isn't it?
But just to be on the safe side, maybe it was best to keep pretending that one was a stuffed figure. Not to move. Never to move. Just to sit here in the tiny room, forever and ever.
If she sat there without moving, they wouldn't punish her.
If she sat there without moving, they'd know that she was sane, sane, sane.
She sat there for quite a long time, and then a fly came buzzing through the bars.
It lighted on her hand.
If she wanted to, she could reach out and swat the fly.
But she didn't swat it.
She didn't swat it, and she hoped they were watching, because that proved what sort of a person she really was.
Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly...”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“I haven't had this much fun since the rats ate my baby sister”
― Robert Bloch

“Then she did see it there - just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn’t a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman. Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

And her head.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“I always carry a pistol when I go [to the New York Public Library]. Never did trust those stone lions.”
― Robert Bloch

“Forget the past, let the dead bury the dead. Things were working out fine, and that was the only thing he had to remember.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Norman Bates will never die...”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho II

“Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher's knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

And her head.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
― Robert Bloch

“Mind you, I cannot swear that my story is true. It may have been a dream; or worse, a symptom of some severe mental disorder. But I believe it is true. After all, how are we to know what things there are on earth? Strange monstrosities still exist, and foul, incredible perversions. Every war, each new geographical or scientific discovery, brings to light some new bit of ghastly evidence that the world is not altogether the same place we fondly imagine it to be. Sometimes peculiar incidents occur which hint of utter madness.

How can we be sure that our smug conceptions of reality actually exist? To one man in a million dreadful knowledge is revealed, and the rest of us remain mercifully ignorant. There have been travelers who never came back, and research workers who disappeared. Some of those who did return were deemed mad because of what they told, and others sensibly concealed the wisdom that had so horribly been revealed. Blind as we are, we know a little of what lurks beneath our normal life. There have been tales of sea serpents and creatures of the deep; legends of dwarfs and giants; records of queer medical horrors and unnatural births. Stunted nightmares of men's personalities have blossomed into being under the awful stimulus of war, or pestilence, or famine. There have been cannibals, necrophiles, and ghouls; loathsome rites of worship and sacrifice; maniacal murders, and blasphemous crimes. When I think, then, of what I saw and heard, and compare it with certain other grotesque and unbelievable authenticities, I begin to fear for my reason. ("The Mannikin")”
― Robert Bloch, Monster Mix

“There's nothing to this telepathy business. It's all in the mind.”
― Robert Bloch

“All at once she could hear the sullen patter of the rain and sense the sigh of the wind behind it. She remembered the sound, because it had rained like that the day Mom was buried, the day they lowered her into that little rectangle of darkness.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Henderson sighed. There was a time, he reflected, when the coming of this night meant something. A dark Europe, groaning in superstitious fear, dedicated this Eve to the grinning Unknown. A million doors had once been barred against the evil visitants, a million prayers mumbled, a million candles lit. There was something majestic about the idea, Henderson reflected.”
― Robert Bloch, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“So much for modern science and its wonderful discoveries that just about everything can kill you. Life is only a bedtime story before a long, long sleep.”
― Robert Bloch, Lori

“Everything in this business makes sense, because it serves a real purpose, fills a need that's a part of living. Even a single nail, like this one, fulfills a function. Drive it into a crucial place and you can depend on it to do a job, keep on doing it for a hundred years to come. Long after we're dead and gone, both of us.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“The room was plainly but adequately furnished; she noted the shower stall in the bathroom beyond. Actually, she would have preferred a tub, but this would do. ”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“why do we personify time? Is it because we’re afraid to admit that our lives are measured by an abstract force that neither knows nor cares about our entry into existence? Or our departure into death? Time is our mysterious master giving it a face and hands we attempt to transform it into our servant.”
― Robert Bloch