William Cook > William's Quotes

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“As any psychiatrist will tell you, it is a fact of life, a psychological home truth, that every human being from Mother Teresa to Jack the Ripper operates from the same basic needs, using the same basic defenses, and accessing the same basic pool of emotions as every other human being. Deep down below the surface, we all want to be safe, we all want to be loved, and we all want to be respected. (15)”
― Jonathan Nasaw, Twenty Seven Bones

“Fears of the future [are] almost always rooted in the past. (175)”
― Jonathan Nasaw, The World on Blood

“Fear, of course, was always, and in the end only, about itself. (45)”
― Jonathan Nasaw, The World on Blood

“It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
― John Lennon

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I'm scared of madmen with knives, and perverts hiding in alleys. I'm scared of
people, because they're shit. But etheric entities don't frighten me. They don't have
hands of flesh and blood. They can't fire a gun. The only way they can hurt you is
through fear, your own mind. You must know that.”
― Stephen Jones, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

“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

“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