Top 18 Jonathan Maberry Quotes

I love weird science. I love weird action. I love weird characters.

‘Bad Blood’ tells the story of Trick, a teenage slacker on the losing side of a fight with cancer. When he’s attacked by a vampire, he figures it’s game over. Except that the chemo drugs in Trick’s blood poison the vampire.

Like most writers, I read deeply into the genre in which I write.

When I was in middle school, the librarian there was secretary for a couple of groups of professional writers. She introduced me to Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, and I became very friendly with them over a period of two years. Both of them were very generous with their time, guidance and advice.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to ‘shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they’re the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.’ That sounded like bad advice to me.

When I first encountered the ‘Sigma Force’ novels – long before I became friends with Jim Rollins – a bookseller told me that these stories were about ‘geeks with guns.’ While not entirely accurate, that’s pretty close to the mark, and that really speaks to me.

‘V-Wars‘ is a head-on collision of real-world science, terrorism, special forces action, ethics, politics and an exploration of what defines us as human.

When my writing career took off, it was pretty easy to keep my ego in check because old-school martial arts isn’t about ego gratification. It’s about maintaining a balanced view of the world and your place in it.

When people ask me about what I learned from martial arts, I don’t talk about favorite punches or kicks, or about fights won or lost. I talk about learning self-discipline, about ethics and manners and benevolence and fairness.

My first book deal was actually for a textbook – ‘Judo and You’ – that I wrote while teaching at Temple University. A scout for Kendall-Hunt came looking for someone to write the book, and even though it wasn’t a course I was teaching there, I agreed to write it.

When we look at the flowers, we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we’ll join them in the cold ground.

Jim Rollins is the king of the weird science action genre.

By the time I finished the first series, ‘Marvel Universe vs. Punisher,’ I knew that there was a lot more story to tell.

I don’t aspire to write like Steve King. Sure, I admire his work, and I think he’s a hell of a nice guy; we met shortly after my first Stoker win. I aspire to write like Jonathan Maberry.

I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn’t mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write… I learned that writer’s block is a myth created by people who don’t have, or understand, a writing process.

Wolverine is a world-weary old warrior. His rage issue notwithstanding, I see him as someone with the tortured soul of a poet, but one who has seen too many friends and lovers die. Even with that, he has grown into a leader and a true hero.

If you battle monsters, you don’t always become a monster. But you aren’t entirely human anymore, either.

Write the best book you can, the one that demands to be written, no matter what genre it is. Even a trend the trades tell you has gone stale can be revitalized by a superb piece of writing. It’ll never be revitalized by someone jumping on a trend bandwagon.