Christopher Bollen Quotes

Everyone loves a dead artist. It's the living ones that people can't tolerate.

They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles.

I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980].

Your little eco-friendly fairy tale ain't going to happen. This was farming land long before it was cute-house land.

Do you know what geography really is?" Ted asked. "It's not the shapes of countries or a list of trade routes. Geography is a snapshot of war, plain and simple. It's a record of the state of hostile powers at a moment of suspended animation.

The death drive is parasitic. It runs off of other drives, leeching off of them.

There's a structure to a detective story that I can easily understand. I understand playing that particular game. It's like solving a puzzle. Or creating a puzzle.

In a lot of ways, work was my graduate school.

He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which he never had to do when he imagined straight couples having sex.

There is a value to moving more slowly through a story.

The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It's the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast." She dropped the bee into the terrarium and returned it slowly to the table. "Maybe that's bullshit. I happen to like the beasts.

There's also something sexual about watching the nubile girl in terror. But you do take on her fear as your own.

We lost so many talented artists and writers from the generations before ours that we're really lacking older figureheads.

It's all a fucking trap, owning things, places, people. The way I see it, we don't own things. We get owned.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

I feel that I'm solid at description.

Paul needed to come out, not as gay or straight, but as human.

All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.

I have to say I do read partly for escapism. Why can't I escape and learn something?

To discover someone was ordinary always struck Mills as a kind of betrayal. Whenever a man Mills presumed was gay turned out to be straight, the aura about him crumbled, the clues reassembling into the most indistinctive brand of human being - normal, hiding nothing, a mind like a weather vane that moved with the prevailing winds.

Why I love chess and tennis - the volleying aspect, and the fact that your competitors' reactions and motivations and bluffs come into the game itself.

Looking back, [R.E.M.]videos, by in large, have always been art films. I'm thinking of "Losing My Religion." That's a landmark piece.

I had been going out to Orient for several years.

I'm ultimately not so much of a professor as a progresser. And I'm ready to move away from what I consider to be this weird mid-century dream that I feel pulls us as a country, and us as a culture, backward.

If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in the subject: those future babies would be its next generation of users.

It's families that stop people. All they're good for is guilt.

Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.

Going out into the country after living in the city is a loss of control.

I'm convinced I was the only kid ever who had a Death on the Nile [1978] movie poster and a Murder on the Orient Express [1974] movie poster on his bedroom walls.

I was a very scared child.

There's a great scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974] that I'm obsessed with: Sally is being chased by Leatherface with a chainsaw. And she runs into thorn bushes. And she's getting tangled up in it because she's running fast. But Sally needs to move slowly in order to get through the bushes - she will get farther faster by going slowly because her hair and clothes won't get tangled and caught. There's something really beautiful about understanding that, while someone's chasing you with a chainsaw, you have to move more slowly in order to get away.

These are the males," she said. Beth leaned in to examine it. "Any stimulation," Magdalena said, and finished the thought by gently rubbing her fingers together. The bee's hoary tail split open, and a thin, stamenlike organ shot out and curled. "Like all males, harmless and easily aroused." She laughed. "It's the females you have to be careful about.

I also remember when I watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1990] at, like, age 15. That scared the crap out of me. Because it didn't operate inside the usual conventions of the horror genre in the way that I could accept. I can accept horny teenager counselors being murdered at camp. But I couldn't accept the derangement of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was that anyone could be murdered at any moment - whole families, with no build-up music and no meaning. It terrified me.

I'm not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I'm offering a whole new variety of services, plural - water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren't being poisoned in your own home.

Today, MTV doesn't play videos anymore, but YouTube certainly has become the next MTV.

I have always wanted to be either a cinematographer or a veterinarian.

It's always surprised me that mainstream America had the good taste to like R.E.M. It doesn't have the digestible quality the general public tends to look for in its favorite musicians.

It is a little out of touch to presume that someone wants to follow your every observation and insight over the course of hundreds of pages without any sort of payoff. That's why writing isn't a one-way street. You have to give something back: an interesting plot, a surprise, a laugh, a moment of tenderness, a mystery for the reader to piece together.

She had no way of evaluating the beauty of someone so young. All young people looked beautiful to her now.

I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time.

Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists.

Condom," she said. He grabbed a gold square off his nightstand, tore it open, and milked the rubber down his shaft. These were awkward seconds for a man, no matter how attractive the woman under him appeared - legs open, breasts resting on the rib cage - because a man has to stay hard while the woman watches in some negative quiet where irrevocable judgments are formed.

My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession.

A family wasn't forged out of steel. You dig a hole in a person and then you fill it with yourself.

Every time I try to write on vacation, I fail miserably.

There's something about fear and aesthetic that go hand in hand.

Time was the single asset that every country, every market, depended on.

All close friendships are marked with competition. Our earliest tests are against our siblings and playmates, and some of that rivalry endures amongst friends into adulthood. Like dogs play fighting, you learn not to bite hard.

The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town.

Women had cup sizes to track their development. Men had a ruler and hope.

Tommy was tall and wide-hipped, but Mills couldn't tell what kind of body lay underneath the black T-shirt and jeans, what kind of person, what kind of smell or ability to reach over in the dark. There were certain things a person could only learn by touching someone else.

When do the defense measures of a paranoid country become their own agents of self-destruction?

Critics like mailmen delivering unwanted news.

Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don't need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs to get that sensation.

You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it.

There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they've met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who's lived the most." "Isn't that called Facebook?

I've never even done a residency.

Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.

I was obsessed with Agatha Christie in sixth grade.

One day I want to write a full-on horror book.

I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day.

My strength is character. I'm pretty good at building walking-talking humans with brains like beehives.

My parents were great parents, but for some bizarre reason they allowed me to watch whatever I wanted on TV, we had cable. And I constantly watched horror movies.

As much as I adore Agatha Christie - and I think people make this claim about murder mysteries in general - it's often a very conservative mode of storytelling. Usually it's the greedy, climbing, new-money slimeball who wants to take from the aristocracy.