Top 80 Stephen Graham Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it’s art that carries you at the end.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

2. “This is all you really need, isn’t it? Just one good friend. Somebody you can be stupid with. Somebody who’ll peel you up off the ground, prop you against the wall.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

3. “The land claims what you leave behind.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

4. “If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,” he said.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

5. “You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

6. “Writing, of course, it’s not all in your head. Not talking about the ‘manual’ act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction’s really working, your whole body’s involved, and then some.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

7. “The modern world, it’s custom-designed to kill werewolves. There’s french fries, for one.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

8. “The phone she left behind in its foggy balloon is just recording the empty aluminum canoe now, and one blurry corner of the little cooler. But it’s listening in its muted way. What it hears is the front part of Lotte’s scream. She doesn’t get to finish it.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

9. “The truth is, poverty’s the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren’t rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

10. “But everything’s Horror, isn’t it? Sometimes you just can’t see the blood.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

11. “Everything makes sense if you look at it long enough.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

12. “My heart is a chainsaw, yes, but you’re the one who starts it.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

13. “We’re from where we’re from,” she says back. “Scars are part of the deal, aren’t they?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

14. “The stories I respect most aren’t those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won’t possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn’t draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

15. “It’s soft at the end. Not just the pain, but the world.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

16. “It was a good day to die, but nobody did.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

17. “Just like my mom, Grandma had died the day she gave birth. It was like a curse in our family. “Because.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

18. “Being a werewolf isn’t just teeth and claws,” she said, her lips brushing my ear she was so close, so quiet, “it’s inside. It’s how you look at the world. It’s how the world looks back at you.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

19. “I’m all right,” I told her. This is a lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

20. “This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

21. “Life’s so much easier when you’re not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

22. “In the old days, the boy’s mom would have gotten a name for what she did: Shoots the Car Twice or Four Holes in the Glass or Doesn’t Ever Learn or Can’t Stop Fighting.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

23. “Football’s another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball’s the only real sport, the only one that matters.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

24. “If the only good Indian is a dead one, then she’s going to be the worst Indian ever.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

25. “Art isn’t and shouldn’t be responsible. If it is, it isn’t functioning as art.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

26. “I do love the challenge of screenplays. They’re so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can’t keep my fingers out of.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

27. “It’s important to look ahead, I think, to shape your stuff for – again – effect. Because it’s just so easy to write long, flowy sentences, get lost in them. The hard part’s making them matter, making yourself make them matter.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

28. “Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

29. “An elk mother, cornered, will slash with her hooves and tear with her mouth and even offer the hope of her own hamstrings, and if none of that works, she’ll rise again years and years later, because it’s never over, it’s always just beginning again.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

30. “This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice – blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

31. “But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

32. “I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story’s asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

33. “My grandfather used to tell me he was a werewolf. He’d.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

34. “What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it’s a good story.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

35. “To really live is to waver at the edge of an open-eyed dream, so that everybody’s always jerking their head around, sure you’re there. And.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

36. “That’s how they were supposed to be. It’s what they, at fifteen, were supposed to have been doing. They’d been fired into adolescence and were swerving to each side now like crazy, trying to find the straight and narrow.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

37. “That’s how it is with werewolves. You have something, then you just have the story of it.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

38. “A thousand truck-stop T-shirts can’t be wrong.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

39. “A long time ago Darren had said that bears and wolves weren’t meant to get along. I thought he’d been talking about state troopers, though. This.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

40. “Peta reaches up to his forehead, delicately removes a flake of paint from the basketball pole, and then pulls him to her chest, her palm to his cheek, and this, her, it’s home, and it’s not haunted, not even a little.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

41. “When the whole world hurts, you bite it. Don’t you?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

42. “Stupid girls run upstairs, stupid girls run upstairs,” she’s saying to herself, turning to pull Ben with her up the aluminum steps, Billie Jean just feet behind them.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

43. “Always feed a wolf his fill,” the old woman quotes out loud, “lest you wake with your throat in his jaws.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

44. “The ladder tilts the opposite way, like it doesn’t want to be involved in anything this ugly, and all of this is in the slowest possible motion for Lewis, his head snapping as many pictures as it can on the way down, like they can stack up under him, break his fall.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

45. “Sometimes you just know what you’re doing is the only thing to be doing. That the world is conspiring all around you to make it happen, like, not just giving you permission, but herding you the direction you need to go, giving you secret nods and obvious hand signals, and getting everything out of the way so you have the clearest path possible.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

46. “Each time he came back with all his fingers he would flash thumbs-up all around the platform to show how he was lucky, how none of this was ever going to touch him.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

47. “What I was doing was making deals. With the world. I’ll take care of you, you take care of me, cool?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

48. “Lewis made sure Shaney left with an armload of books, a whole series, to prove to Peta why she’d been there, but the whole time, stacking them up, it felt like an overcorrection, like trying to hide a body on the lawn by covering it with eight other bodies.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

49. “It’s almost October though, and horror is my religion. Can I not celebrate orthodoxly and honor my church’s holy days?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

50. “Lewis finds the fourteen-foot aluminum ladder under boxes in the garage, Three Stooges in into the backyard...”

— Stephen Graham Jones