Glen Duncan Quotes

There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

The Mortals are free, Lucifer. What they've done they've done from within themselves. - Raphael

When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.

Suddenly, he missed her, their shared history. The way they remained tuned to each other across a room full of people. He's look up and see her green eyes glance at him. Yes. I know. Us. They'd known there was nothing novel about it as far as the world was concerned; they'd known it was only love, which the world had seen billions of times before. Or rather Cheryl had known. He'd never considered it. Having fallen in love with her he'd realised love was what he's been waiting for. The question of what he [i]wanted[/i] out of life had been answered. Whereas Cheryl had space left over. It was one of the differences between them. It was what kept him striving towards her.

It's why people in sexual extremis say Oh, God. It's not a cry to the Divine, it's a recognition of their own divinity.

Do you know how few men there are worth having?

When something happened that was everything to you you realized it was nothing to everything else.

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.

Yes, Eden was beautiful- and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it- so be it. (Hasn't it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? 'Presume not the ways of God to scan,' you've been told in umpteen variations, 'the proper study of Mankind is Man.' Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That's generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.)

My family is Anglo-Indian, and of the four children, I'm the only one who wasn't born in India.

But all the while and all the while and all the while the world.

You give thanks for small things. I gave thanks that I was wearing jeans, not a skirt. People start trying to kill you, you stop wearing skirts.

The beauty of the concept is that it takes the wind out of so many would-be ethical sails: the company that owns the porn-mag owns the company that makes the washing powder. The company that owns the munitions plants owns the company that makes the budgerigar food. The company that owns the nuclear waste owns the company that picks up your trash. These days, thanks to me, unless you pack up and go and live in a cave, you're putting money into evil and shit. And let's be realistic, if the cost of ethics is life in a cave ...

You save yourself. That's all. You save yourself, or you're damned.

Reader, I ate him.

It's Big Brother with werewolves. Live coverage for a month, leading up to a group kill on full moon.

It's just what you're stuck with, the lousy furniture you can't change. The educated me knows hell's nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I'm going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way."
"It's the postmodern solution," I said. "Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.

Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate their efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn't go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who'd taken their lives and devoured them, into you.

You don't believe in the soul until you feel it straining to escape the body.

Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died.

I wish you had fucked her. Then you'd know. Then you'd know the sublime ... Her asshole, for example. It's like a stern coquettish spoiled secretary working for Himmler -

If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you'd be miserable poor.

Grace only exists to be
fallen from.

He didn't protest much. Evidently he had a penchant for surrender.

I'd heard a Catholic nun on TV once saying that bearing suffering was the route to grace. I remembered Fluff saying: If there's a God he's addicted to faith. Because without evil there's no need for faith. I can't get excited about a God who's divinity depends on a drug habit.

(I invented rock and roll. You wouldn't believe the things I've invented. Anal sex, obviously. Smoking. Astrology. Money ... Let's save time: Everything in the world that distracts you from thinking about God. Which ... pretty much ... is everything in the world, isn't it? Gosh.)

I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.

You can't live if you can't accept what you are, and you can't accept what you are if you can't say what you do.

Embrace determinism and you're chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.

The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis.

Heaven's heard us down here, cackling at our piss-takes and chortling at our quips; I've seen the looks, the suspicion that they're missing out on it, this laughing malarkey. But they always turn away, Gabriel to horn practice, Michael to the weights. Truth is they're timid. If there was a safe way down
a fire escape (boom-boom)
there'd be more than a handful of deserters tiptoeing down to my door. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, yes
but get ready for a rart ol' giggle, dearie.

The yeehaw explanation is we're too busy chasing meat'n'pussy.

Life's generally artless, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind yor back, and before you know it you're in a final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror-movine, usually ...

The collective human unconscious can't stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn't accident, it's deep species strategy.

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.

Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt, The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jeweled with tears.

We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.

I'm constantly dogged with a feeling of fraudulence, so if somebody tells me they like what I've written, then I immediately begin to think it's rubbish.

I counted seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room.

Until the age of thirteen, I tortured the waiting worlds of book illustration and professional football by shilly-shallying over which of them was going to get the benefit of my inestimable talents.

We're the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it's only the best thing for us if it's the worst thing for someone else.

This writing malarkey should come with a health warning: MAY CAUSE INCESSANT DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION, AND DROWSINESS.

But wulf did what it does: Simply insisted. Simply burned through. Simply defied. The same shrugging, grinning continuance. The nature of life. The nature of the beast.

You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn't strike you down. The sky didn't fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out ... It was still good when you raised your arm for a cab and one came towards you out of the flow like magic. You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: You kept going.

He had a reservoir of tolerance for pain. Finite, though. Pain would empty it, eventually.

For the minimum-wager with Caligulan needs, the glory days are soon over.

The modern adult, Jake had written, has really only one thing to say to its inner child: I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry

You're fond, I imagine of your right eye? I mean, you've gone to the trouble of putting make up on it.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

All the metaphors in this world wouldn't scratch the surface of what stepping into darkness is like for me. And that's just darkness. Don't get me started on light. Really, don't get me started on light.

I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I'm not sure I ever really liked him.'
Adam?' I said. 'I don't blame you.' 'Not Adam,' she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. 'God.

She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to growth
and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about is that she'd already domesticated a cat and called it Misty.

All his strength gathered in his hips and chest and his arms wrapped around me and his breath jabbed soft and hot in my ear and a note of tenderness was there at the end like a lovely curlicue and I liked him because there was no disguising the honest male gladness that went from his body out to mine.

There are, I'm depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt.

She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it.

Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.

The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.

Live long enough and nothing is news. 'The News' is
'the new things.' That's fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details.

Temptation's less about wearing someone down with repetition than it is about finding the right phrase and dropping it in at the right time.

Werewolves are not the subject of academe," she said, "but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. 'Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We've seen ourselves in concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we've read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there's no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It's been us all along.

Whatever doesn't kill them, makes them make reality TV shows ...

Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It's a survival necessity. You can't live if you can't accept what you are, and you can't accept what you are if you can't say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.

I haven't won any prizes or had any best sellers.

Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.

Naturally we looked at each other. Naturally the single second that passed was more than enough time to enjoy a purified intimacy, to note each other's details and feel the exact weight of each other's history. naturally our essences, peremptorily denuded, exchanged a stunned glance.
Then I shot him in the face.

You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn't. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you'll find it a room.

A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale," I said. "But she's naked and the storyteller's hands are all over her.

What interests me is love, sex, death, cruelty, compassion and the desire for meaning in an apparently godless universe. In other words the human condition.

My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate.

Imagination was condemned to make something of things.

I'm supposed to be guilty of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, but when you get right down to it, I'm really only guilty of one: wondering. The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it's paved with intriguing questions. You want to know. Man do you want to know.

Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing.

While I was writing 'The Last Werewolf,' I didn't watch any horror movies.

Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.

I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.

My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.

You love life because life's all there is.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

It wasn't love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,' Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he'd found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.

She revisited sex now as a ruined project she couldn't entirely give up on.

That was the treachery of suffering. It took you to the point from which you thought death must follow, then let you know it could hold you there indefinitely. That was when you stopped fearing death and started wanting it, praying for it, begging for it.

You know why they invented the phrase 'case closed'?
What?
So that the audience would know it wasn't.

The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.

One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

Oy, Jake," he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I'd disappointed with my weak will. "Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you ... " He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior ... "Actually I do know this is hard for you. I'm sorry. I'm not using my imagination. That was my New Year's resolution, you know. Work on standing in the other fellow's shoes. That and to read one poem every day.

The winter of 1991 found me stunned and shivering in the aftermath of an imploded love affair. Being 26, I flung myself actorishly on London and, without any intimations of my own ludicrousness, spent two years showing God what I thought of Him by letting myself go.

The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it's paved with intriguing questions.

From a floor below someone was singing with a karaoke machine, Paul McCartney's 'Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time,' completely out of tune. 'Beyond doubt the worst Christmas song ever written,' New York said to me, quietly. 'Like a request to God to end the universe.

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities.

The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad, and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.

Some part of me ... had been waiting, since Kelp's death, for certainty that God ... was either dead or malicious. On the cot, now, in the rain-shadowed room with the medicine smells, I knew it was worse than that. They were a challenge, a dare: you must look at the horrors of the world and find a way back to faith in spite of what you saw. I had a glimpse of what the purer version of myself might be capable of: enduring the loss, keeping the rage and disgust down, finding meaning through suffering. But it was only a glimpse. There was so much shame, and the shame made me angry at the thought of getting better.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?

There are two ways to write a werewolf novel - you can examine the genre conventions, or you can say, 'What would it be like if I were a werewolf?'

Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses...

Where ever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood.

It was a terrible refreshment, his plain way, the simple words, the absence of strategy. It made you realize how much of your life you spent not being like that. It made you realize what a waste not being like that was.

The pornologue's mantric (as is the Athanasian Creed, for that matter) sucking her down to a level of herself where no questions are asked, where her history evaporates, where her self bleeds painlessly into the void.