104 Quotes by Jennifer McMahon

One exercise I always do when I'm getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper, and start with, 'I never told anybody...' and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.

My grandmother was a psychiatrist and possibly the ultimate of all skeptics. But even she couldn't explain the strange noises we so often heard in the attic.

My grandmother was a psychiatrist and had shelves full of medical books - I was constantly sneaking looks at some of those. I was fascinated by the descriptions of illnesses and diseases.

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

I graduated with a B.A. from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the M.F.A. in Writing Program at Vermont College.

I have a friend who calls me the queen of the nightmares because I've always had really bad nightmares. I keep a notebook by the side of my bed, so I'll wake up in the night from a bad dream, and my heart's pounding, and I'm really scared, but I write it down, and sometimes I get ideas for books that way.

I have a pretty open mind about supernatural stuff - I do believe that there's more to this world than what meets the eye.

I found many treasures in the woods over the years: shotgun shells, empty Colt 45 bottles, old railroad spikes, orange and black beetles eating a dead mouse, pebbles that looked just like teeth, old stone walls and cellar holes, a rusted out frying pan, the skull of a cat.

I absolutely love writing about the things that scare me, the things that keep me up at night. I don't quite know why. Perhaps because so many things do scare me, and this is my subconscious way of trying to exercise some control over things that go bump in the night!