Quotes by Benjamin Percy - Page 1

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Meat
Potatoes
Sustain
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I don't flinch from darkness, but I've always been bothered by what I call gore-nography.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Bothered
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I grew up in western Oregon, just outside Eugene, on 27 wooded acres that served as my playground.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Acres
Oregon
Western
Playground
Served
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I grew up on genre - on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Fantasy Novels
Horror
Spy
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People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
People
Pull Ups
Smell
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I grew up on genre. If it had a dragon on the cover, I was interested. But horror, especially, really gripped me in its bony fist.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Genre
Cover
Fist
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I want to build as many worlds as possible - each a version of ours with a crack running through it - and not be anchored to any of them.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Running
Cracks
Want
World
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I wanted it to be as multi-windowed as possible, so that the reader felt like they were seeing all the different ways in to a big haunted house.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Different
House
Way
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I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Car
Gun
Tools
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Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Empathy
Views
Writing
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You can't teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Moving
Rocks
Stars
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I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Fulfilling
Screenplays
Twelve
Time Me I Can
Creatively
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My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Might
Puppets
Voice
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The USDA labs in Ames, Iowa, are level-four security clearance. Every nasty thing you can imagine is stored there. Ground zero for the apocalypse. And there's a day care right across the street.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Zero
Apocalypse
Clearance
Ground Zero
Iowa
Labs
Nasty
Stored
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The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Men
Grace
Writing
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People like to pigeonhole. People like to label - not just books and movies, but everything in their life. If people want to call me 'literary horror,' I guess that's fine. What I'm trying to do is be both thrilling and thought-provoking.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Thrilling
Life Movies Me
Literary
Label
Pigeonhole
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There is no cure for prions. They are a protein-based disease that, among other things, targets and transforms your brain. The symptoms reveal themselves differently in each host, and you might go months or you might go years before you realize you're infected.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Brain
Disease
Host
Might
Months
Symptoms
Years
Things
Go
Among
Before
Cure
Each
Infected
Other
Realize
Reveal
Targets
Themselves
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Yes, I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools. My parents went through a back-to-the-land phase. Most of our vegetables and fruits came from our own garden.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Birthday
Car
Garden
Grew
Tools
Vegetables
Came
Guns
Fact
Fruits
Parents
In Fact
Instead
Phase
Playful
Received
Yes
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I travel often, so my routine is always getting scrambled. But on a standard sort of day, I get up at 6, pack lunches, hustle the kids off to school, then brew a pot of coffee and head downstairs to the dungeon, as I call it: my cobwebby office in the basement.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Travel
Coffee
Hustle
Routine
School
Always Day School
Basement
Brew
Call
Downstairs
Dungeon
Getting
Off
Head
Standard
Pack
Scrambled
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It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Doors
Honing
Letters
Pages
Rejection
Craft
Incredibly
Published
Sent
Thousands
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My voice is rather quirky. It's abysmally low. People often think I'm putting it on at first. Think drunk Darth Vader. Or Barry White singing country. It suits my dark material. When I do readings, I really play it up and go subterranean. I can make the phone book sound terrifying.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Quirky
Drunk
Vader
Barry
Darth
Darth Vader
Terrifying
Readings
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As in the case of many of the stories that I've written I'm not trying to editorialize. I don't want there to be a message at the end of anything I write. Otherwise you wouldn't trust the characters. They'd feel less organic and more like puppets that are sharing the author's opinion.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Character
Trying
Writing
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I found collaboration to be a terrible thing in Hollywood because there are so many people involved you have to make a thousand little compromises to every project and every single scene is a committee decision. It's maddening. But with comics you've got an artist and you've got a writer.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Artist
Decision
People
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Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Bottom
Fishing
Growing Up
Hiking
Hunting
Mountain
Rifles
Truck
Canyon
Passed
Throw
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I think everyone can relate to the werewolf myth - because we've all, as a result of alcohol, drugs, exhaustion, rage, gone off the leash and come to regret it later. I appeal to this psychologically - the unleashed id - but with a biological cause; I'm hopefully making possible supernatural circumstances.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Alcohol
Regret
Thinking
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I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Character
Thinking
Writing
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I have a scenario but almost always it's entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I'm thinking about books novels. I've got these scrolls of paper that I hang up in my office and this is my idea room, my nightmare factory, and I have a big title at the top of the scroll and on the left hand side I have these character sketches on the characters, and then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I'm able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that's where plot springs from.
Benjamin Percy / Writer
Book
Character
Spring
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Benjamin Percy Quotes - Page 1

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