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Genre Quotes

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Genre Quotes

“I had an idea for a medical conspiracy thriller. Since it was non-horror, I didn't want the publishers and editors bringing a lot of baggage - my history as a genre writer in the SF and horror fields, for instance - to the novel when they read it. I wanted them to consider the book solely on its own merits. So I called myself Colin Andrews. I was tired of seeing my books at floor level. Not that Herman Wouk and Phyllis Whitney and William Wharton are bad company, but I wanted to be up at eye level for a change, where people with bad backs could get a chance to see my books.”

“I've always thought that "punk" wasn't really a genre. My band started in Olympia where K Records was and K Records put out music that didn't sound super loud and aggressive. And yet they were punk because they were creating culture in their own community instead of taking their cue from MTV about what was real music and what was cool. It wasn't about a certain fashion. It was about your ideology, it was about creating a community and doing it on your own and not having to rely on, kinda, "The Man" to brand you and say that you were okay.”

“I never had a problem with genre because a genre actually is like a uniform - you put yourself into a certain uniform. But if you dress up in a police officer's uniform, it doesn't mean that you are an officer; it can mean something else. But this is the starting point, and the best way is to not to fit into this uniform but to make this uniform a part of yourself.”

“I've published over 100 books - and that is divided about 50/50 adult and young adult. Lately, I have been writing more YA, which is such a great genre to write it. I don't have a favourite (I usually say it's the last book I've written), but certain books do stick in the mind. My very first YA novel, The Children of Lir, will always be special to me, and, of course The Alchemyst because it was a series I'd wanted to write for ages.”

“I wrote, I think, half a dozen films that were completely out of genre. Comedies, love stories, even one serious film about Vietnam, and we couldn't get backing for any of it. And we both sort of drifted from making, at that time, serious money on Last House to going through it all in the course of almost three years and only getting offers to do something scary again.”

“I realized that I really, almost by accident, had fallen into a labyrinthine, very powerful paradigm for dealing with these things through genre films. And once I realized that and realized the power of it, and the fact that because horror films aren't, in general, studio products - studios back them sometimes, but they don't try to meddle too much, because they kind of don't want to sully their skirts - you have a lot of freedom.”

“I came to terms with living mostly in a world of horror pictures or genre pictures. I have had a few chances to get outside and do something different, like Paris, Je T'Aime or Music Of The Heart, but mostly it's been my lot. And to have created, with a few shocking films, an awareness or a perception of me as somebody dangerous and scary - that can be sold, but trying to sell me for some other kind of picture, like Music Of The Heart, was very difficult.”

“There are shows, a lot of small cable shows like Breaking Bad, where in the general population nobody watches them really, but everybody in Los Angeles in the industry watches them, and to get a small role on a show like that actually, in some respects, advances your career more than having a huge hit role on a genre show because they are somehow dismissed as a secondary market in this industry”

“Write what you want to read. So many people think they need to write a particular kind of book, or imitate a successful style, in order to be published. I've known people who felt they had to model their book on existing blockbusters, or write in a genre that's supposed to be "hot right now" in order to get agents and publishers interested. But if you're writing in a genre you don't like, or modeling yourself on a book you don't respect, it'll show through. You're your first, most important reader, so write the book that reader really wants to read.”

“What bother me, not "bother me," exactly; that's not the right way to put it. But especially in the horror genre, once a movie like Paranormal Activity comes out and becomes popular - and that's a totally fine and valid movie - everyone starts copying it. Everything becomes a found-footage movie that looks like somebody shot it with their phone.”

“My music doesn't really sound like punk music, it's acoustic. And it doesn't really sound like folk music 'cause I'm thrashing too hard and emoting a little too much for the sort of introspective, respectful, sort-of folk genre thing. I'm really into punk and folk as music that comes out of communities and is very genuine and very immediate and not commercial.”

“The movement for women's liberation was about an emotional transformation, an explosion, a feeling all over the country that things must be different, and ideas about how they should be. I think fiction can capture that kind of thing better than other genres because in fiction you can explore the feelings of your characters - the before and the after.”