“To be sure, some humans were always doing silly things—but at what point had prime damfoolishness become commonplace? When for example, had the zombie-like professional models become accepted ideals of American womanhood?”

“The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance.”

“Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.”

“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”

“I now had enough faith not only to believe there were answer, but to feel certain that those answers would become apparent at some point in the future.”

“That was the way of things, after all. Children had to grow up. They did not always become what others wanted.”

“Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process.”

“Our experiences have taught us that no matter how silly it may look today, it might become correct at some point in the future when the criteria used for evaluation are changed”

“There's no escaping it-the world is full of lies. It is safest always to accept what one hears as if it were utterly commonplace and devoid of interest.”

“To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They’ve always been a cigar. When I first made Night of the Living Dead, it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way. My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.”