Christopher Rice Quotes

wafting through the open door of a brightly lit office down the musty, darkened corridor of the backstage.

The light in the darkness, as Stephen explained it, did not chase away the shadows of fear and regret: It merely illuminated the fears worth fighting. It lit the paths dictated by fate and choice, rather than casting a celestial glow on the way to a better and more perfect world. Although

I made the decision that, to be happy and to be content, I needed to live the life of an exclusive homosexual. I don't mean an elitist homosexual, but I mean someone who is exclusively pursuing partners of the same gender.

He had a nice house in the Norma Triangle section of West Hollywood and an ass that could stop a war.

Usually when I put my focus on the pacing, the plot, the specific characterizations, - it's ironic - but then I actually increase my chances of writing something that moves people because I haven't become too self-conscious of the goal.

I fear horror became so inextricably related to splatter punk in the late 1980s that a large segment of the audience turned away from it. And thriller became the more comfortable, cozier label because it promised a resolution, a happy ending. Horror came to mean, I'm going to leave your ass out here in the dark with no way to get home. And one of your legs is missing.

You need a quiet place where you can find someone who will listen, someone who will make you feel less like a mistake in a universe intended for assholes and Marines.

Honestly, in retrospect, I would wish for future generations to have the ability to have a coming out process that was less alcohol-soaked than mine was.

I think that I am profoundly influenced by writers who have explored loss, and longing, and fear. Those influences have turned me into a thriller writer, essentially.

When an entire group of people come together and try to make some kind of identity out of what they don't have, they usually end up convincing themselves they can do whatever they damn well please.

'I went to one acting coach when I first started who told me that acting is reacting to the stimuli we are presented with. Does that make sense?' John nodded. 'But really, that's life now, isn't it? Because we are not a product of where we came from or what was done to us. We are what we choose to be in every situation that God delivers. And that's why when a thing of beauty enters my life, I rise to the occasion with everything I have. Some people are humbled by beautiful things, John. I'm not. I'm inspired. I go after them with everything I have. Everything.'

But in general, who's to say what's not gay enough? And how do we even raise that question without raising the far more perilous one of, Is it too gay?

Life, according to Stephen, was not a journey out of darkness into light. In fact, dark and light were two arbitrary categories applied to the human spirit in a vain hope that it, too, with all its fleshy influences, would be as orderly as the rise and fall of the sun. The light in the darkness, as Stephen explained it, did not chase away the shadows of fear and regret: It merely illuminated the fears worth fighting. It lit the paths dictated by fate and choice, rather than casting a celestial glow on the way to a better and more perfect world.

Any spot where the earth kisses the clouds is a special place, a place where primal truths reveal themselves to those who've acquired the wisdom of solitude.

Fear cannot touch me ...
It can only taunt me,
It cannot take me,
Just tell me where to go ...
I can either follow,
Or stay in my bed ...
I can hold on
To the things that I know ...
The dead stay dead,
They cannot walk.
The shadows are darkness.
And darkness cannot talk

I do believe in the Kinsey scale, I think many of us fall in different places on the scale and I think it's for each one of us to decide where we are on the scale, it's not for someone else to decide for us.

My experience of coming out was very much centered around the bar scene. And what happened for me is that when I turned 18 and was old enough to get into certain gay bars in the French Quarter, I became a regular customer.

If you're doing something, if you're following something that is directly at odds with who you are, you've got to slow down and ask yourself why you're following that dream.

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that's appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

She doesn't have to work to blend in because in the French Quarter, all you have to do to blend in is dance with the chaos.

And you know instantly what it means. You know you're being punished by God, by your parents, by everyone you have ever met, everyone who ever knew your secret. Because all you wanted was to feel less alone. All you wanted was to have them smile at who you actually were.

I wondered if I was more addicted to being sad than I was to bourbon or cocaine.

Ultimately, I felt fortunate, because in many ways I did identify with aspects of being gay that were very stereotypical. I was a big theatre kid in high school, I was creative, I was very emotionally sensitive, even hypersensitive. I loved female divas.

Snarky Snarkerson!

I think for gay people to see gay people living honestly about everything they do is really a contribution.

I think the gay community, as a whole, is slighted by high-profile figures who remain in the closet. But I think that a lot of times we need to ask ourselves what that person's role in our community would be if they were out of the closet.

I had seen the gay social chronicle done abundantly and done very well. And I didn't want to do any more of that myself, I wanted us to be included in the popular mainstream of entertainment fiction.

This might be the price of vengeance, she thinks. You have to spend the rest of your life living inside the memories of the worst things done to you so you can constantly justify what you did to avenge them.

Make a beautiful mess and clean it up later.

I don't want to judge anyone's sex life - but I worry that those are the only options we are giving to our young people.

You can leave. You just don't want to. And the more you give in to that urge, the more you'll come to believe the lies you're telling yourself about what you are and aren't capable of.

Look at any city through the right memories and it could become a graveyard as haunted as a former battlefield.

Why do these people like pain so much?

In an instant, he became convinced that what really tied the universe together was not the bright light and airy-fairy bullshit that spiritual people were always trying to sell. It was blood spilled in violence; it was split-second rage exacting eternal consequences, and it could happen just as easily in Owensville, California, as in the streets of Ramadi.

The sort of public sex aspects of gay male sexuality did not appeal to me. And it wasn't just a matter of being afraid of them or being too nervous to try them. I did try them and they didn't work for me, they didn't feed me spiritually, they didn't leave me gratified.

You never hate someone that much unless you're afraid of him.

I encourage young people to refrain from putting themselves in dangerous situations in the name of validating themselves sexually.

And he wonders if he has a space in his brain or in his soul for monsters and demons, or if he will, like most people, choose insanity when confronted with a fearsome reality.

You told me about what you called the light in the darkness. About how life was neither good nor bad, but a combination of both and occasionally good things pop up in the middle of tragedy, but they still don't make the tragedy go away. They can't protect you. They're just light. But what you didn't say is that sometimes, certain people can be a light in the darkness. There are some people in this world who are worth saving when other people decide they shine the wrong kind of light on the wrong kind of things. You have been and will always be my light in the darkness.

I think that the most important reason to come out is your own sanity; that's above everything else. I think that applies whether you're a public figure or not. The closet is a terrible place to be for the person who's in it.

I am one of those people, and I may be personally biased, who wishes that I had some place to come out of the closet besides a bar.

I am comfortable calling myself a writer of suspense, or a writer of thrillers; both terms are sort of interchangeable to me. I think that came from a sense of being at conflict with my true nature throughout my youth, and being afraid of discovery, and feeling as if I didn't belong.

What's become more important to me over time is to not try to sell myself as someone that I'm not, and that begins with coming out of the closet and gradually it's a challenge to expand that into other areas of my life.

Vengeance is always possible, he said, but only if your memory can endure it.