Dennis Nilsen Quotes

I have started down the avenue of death and depression of a new kind of flatmate.

The population at large is neither 'ordinary' or 'normal'. They seem to be bound together by a collective ignorance of themselves and what they are. They have, every one of them, got their deep dark thoughts with many a skeleton rattling in their secret cupboards. Their fascination with 'types' like myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these 'dark images and acts' and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark side of themselves.

I have judged myself more harshly than any court ever could.

I am damned and damned and damned. How in heaven's name could I have done any of it?

I did it all for me. Purely selfish. I worshiped the art and the act of
death, over and over. It's as simple as that. Afterwards it was all
sexual confusion, symbolism, honoring the "fallen." I was honoring
myself. I hated the decay and the dissection. There was no
sadistic pleasure in the killing. I killed them as I would like to be
killed myself, enjoying the extremity of the death act itself. If I did
it to myself I could only experience it once. If I did it to others, I
could experience the death act over and over again.
- Dennis Nilsen

In the morning he was lying dead on one of the beds fully clothed. He was dead. I got the impression he wanted to go, and I must have killed him. I can't remember strangling him. I just sat there shocked.

Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain ... There was never a place for me in the scheme of things ... I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark, endless dirges ... I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid, unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime.

I wish I could stop but I could not. I had no other thrill or happiness.