Shirley Jackson

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother's delusions. Now, I don't know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother's delusions, and they're solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do---and watch this carefully please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.

I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have little house all by myself on the moon.

Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.

Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

Tell me something that only I will ever know, was perhaps what she wanted to ask him, or, What will you remember me by? - or even, Nothing of the least importance has ever belonged to me; can you help?

Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children....

I delight in what I fear.

I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes.

I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking." She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried,_ she said, __as because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

We believed optimistically that Laurie was a reformed character. I told my husband, on the last day of Laurie's confinement, that actually one good scare like that could probably mark a child for life, and my husband pointed out that kids frequently have an instinctive desire to follow the good example rather than the bad, once they find out which is which. We agreed that a good moral background and thorough grounding in the Hardy Boys would always tell in the long run.("Arch-Criminal")

Not one of us, even after last night, can say the word "ghost" without a littleinvoluntary smile. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks wheremodern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor ofsuperstition and have no substitute defense.

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer__ny writer, beginning or otherwise__s the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or__indest of all__oes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...

The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this," and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened. There was no change coming, I thought here, only spring; I was wrong to be so frightened. The days would get warmer, and Uncle Julian would sit in the sun, and Constance would laugh when she worked in the garden, and it would always be the same. Jonas went on and on ("And then we sang! And then we sang!") and the leaves moved overhead and it would always be the same.