Andrew Pyper quotes:

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.

I'd read 'Paradise Lost' as an undergrad at university but remembered little about it. No, not true: I remembered few details, but carried with me with the persuasive arguments and pitiable dilemma of its arguable protagonist, Satan.

Monsters just outside our peripheral vision are scarier to contemplate than monsters miles away or in someplace only a fool would set foot in.

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

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

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.

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

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

There's something in human nature that says we need to have at least one symbolic place where chaos and dark desires can live.

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

I enjoy a special collegiality among other writers in the thriller community. They call me Canadas scariest writer, and I love that.

If the hairs on my neck stand up while Im writing, I figure the reader will get the same kind of shock.

Theres something in human nature that says we need to have at least one symbolic place where chaos and dark desires can live.

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.

Your melancholy. Or depression. Along with nine-tenths of the afflictions I've studied, diagnosed, attempted to treat. Call them whatever you like, but they're just different names for loneliness. That's what lets the darkness in. That's what you have to fight.