Victor Lavalle Quotes

Going through all this nonsense to reach someone in charge, this was the first time she'd ever been treated like, well, a patient. With rules that defied all common logic; people employed to help you who are unable, really, to even hear you; the sense that the system's goal is only to keep trouble contained. It's ~ Victor LaValle

Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently. ~ Victor LaValle

Human beings are no damn good," he said. "We are even worse than animals. We like ... "
He trailed off, cleared his throat, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.
"We like monsters," he said. ~ Victor LaValle

Fuck the meek. The despised will inherit the earth! ~ Victor LaValle

I realise I might pass down an incurable illness to my son, but living based on what might go wrong seems like less and less of a life as I get older. The one thing I can try to control is whether I teach my child to be ruled by anxiety, by fear. That's something that gets passed down, too. ~ Victor LaValle

There's the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions. ~ Victor LaValle

I weighed 25 stone, and I didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as an estate. ~ Victor LaValle

Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good. ~ Victor LaValle

He was still on his "two Van Goghs" point. He put his hand on the armrest of her chair. He said, "But the second Van Gogh is just a guy named Vincent. Vincent lived for thirty-seven years. Van Gogh only came to life after Vincent died. Same man, two people. ~ Victor LaValle

What was indifference compared to malice? ~ Victor LaValle

Josephine didn't mean to be so dismissive, but it came surprisingly easily. Then, almost as quickly, she questioned many of the judgments she'd made in her life. Mental patients can't be intelligent, junkies can't be articulate, and so on. But really, honestly, how many did she actually know? ~ Victor LaValle

A good hustler isn't curious. A good hustler only wants his pay. ~ Victor LaValle

The profession is never going back to those days when a handful of wealthy people treated publishing like a hobby: one where the business can lose money because the family has lots of it to burn. Frankly, I don't think that model was ever sustainable, and it really only enriched a small number of writers. ~ Victor LaValle

I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels. ~ Victor LaValle

Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly. ~ Victor LaValle

And you can fool yourself if you're raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn't true. We're rubes too. ~ Victor LaValle

I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier. ~ Victor LaValle

What's beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it's in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they're affected by it. ~ Victor LaValle

The success of any society must be judged by the life of its worst off. No other calculation will do. ~ Victor LaValle

Some people act like it's a sign of weakness if you want to belong, but I think most human beings yearn to find at least one open door in their lifetime. ~ Victor LaValle

As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs. ~ Victor LaValle

The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back. ~ Victor LaValle

I'm always trying to make myself laugh. I'm the most enthusiastic audience I'm likely to find, so if it doesn't make me smile then it probably won't work on you. The jokes that only make me shrug get cut. ~ Victor LaValle

Destroy if all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn't make messes; mankind was the mess. ~ Victor LaValle

Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child ~ Victor LaValle

Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys. ~ Victor LaValle

To believe in only the practical, the rational, the realistic was a kind of glamour as well. But he couldn't enjoy the illusion of order anymore. Monsters aren't real until you meet one. ~ Victor LaValle

A little style is a good thing, but you can't trust a person who won't be ugly in front of you. ~ Victor LaValle

He had, in fact, expected to be paid to play for one evening because that's exactly what the man promised three days earlier. But a wealthy man's reality is remade at will. ~ Victor LaValle

The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth.
Was this the heart I wanted measured? ~ Victor LaValle

Oppression doesn't make people noble. Give any of us a little comfort, and we'll kill to keep it. The despised become despicable. ~ Victor LaValle

There are people who say life is dull. Just a series of mundane events. But I can't agree. Things happen. Bet on that. ~ Victor LaValle

In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey. ~ Victor LaValle

Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny. ~ Victor LaValle

The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice. ~ Victor LaValle

When you have to save the one you love, you will become someone else, something else. You will transform. The only real magic is the things we'll done for the ones we love. ~ Victor LaValle

Here's the thing: I was charming. Well read and well spoken. Observant and even kind. In other words, I was kind of a catch. And I knew this was true. As long as you couldn't see me. If you saw me, you'd think I was the sea cow that had swallowed your catch. ~ Victor LaValle

There were others who would have called him a scammer, a swindler, a con, but he never thought of himself this way. No good charlatan ever did. ~ Victor LaValle

I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview. ~ Victor LaValle

Maybe nobody ever saw themselves completely objectively. Every self-image needs a flattering mirror or two. ~ Victor LaValle

Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing. ~ Victor LaValle

Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building. ~ Victor LaValle

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men. ~ Victor LaValle

Queens, New York. The most ethnically diverse region not just in the United States, but on the entire planet ... In Queens, you will find Korean kids who sound like black kids. Italians who sound like Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans who sound like Italians. Third-generation Irish who sound like old Jews. That's Queens. Not a melting pot, not even a tossed salad, but an all-you-can-eat, mix-and-match buffet. ~ Victor LaValle

No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve. ~ Victor LaValle

Even if you choose to ignore the truth, the truth still changes you. ~ Victor LaValle

Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need. They ~ Victor LaValle

Pepper woke up thinking of butts.
And nothing else.
Ladies' butts.
Skinny butts, big butts, saddlebag butts, flabby and firm butts, the kind that sit so high they seem like part of the woman's back, the kind that ride low and form a UU just above the thighs like in the old television commercials for Hanes Underalls, butts that wiggle and butts that jiggle, sagging butts and robust butts, butts that hardly make an impression under a pair of jeans; sidewinder butts and trumpet butts
the ones so meaty they actually spread out until they appear to be a woman's thighs (ass so fat you can see it from the front), butts as knotty as acorns, butts as smooth as a slice of Gouda, butts with pimples and butts with cellulite, the kind that have pockmarks or red splotches, butts with tattoos and butts with bullet scars. Butts you can cup in your warm hands. Butts and butts and butts.
In other words, Pepper woke up horny. ~ Victor LaValle

I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don't have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people. ~ Victor LaValle

The poor aren't defeated. We're domesticated. ~ Victor LaValle

In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long. ~ Victor LaValle

'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh. ~ Victor LaValle

I'll take Cthulhu over you devils any day. ~ Victor LaValle

Silver mining in the United States didn't start, like hard-core, until the mid-1850s," Louis said. "And only really got big when the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in California."

"It was bad work. Dangerous. Like any mining. But silver also lets out fumes when it's mined. Even Pliny the Elder wrote about how harmful the fumes were, especially to animals. You know Pliny the Elder?"

"The problem with the silver fumes," Louis continued, "is that, over time, they gave the miners delusions. Bad enough that they had to stop mining. Their health deteriorated. And a bunch of them even died." Hard to make fun of something like that, so Pepper didn't. "Do you know what people would say, in these mining towns, when they saw one of these miners falling apart? Walking through town muttering and swinging at phantoms? They said the Devil in Silver got them. It became shorthand. Like someone might say, 'What happened to Mike?' And the answer was always the same. 'The Devil in Silver got him.' " Louis sat straight and crossed his arms and surveyed the table. "Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?" "You're saying we're just making this thing up," Pepper said quietly. Louis seemed disappointed. He dropped his hands into his lap and folded them there. He looked at his sister and Pepper. He turned his head to take in the other patients gathered with their family members there in the hospital. "I'm saying they were dying," Louis said. "They definitely weren't ~ Victor LaValle

I didn't grow up in a small New England town like the one in 'The Sundial.' I was raised in an apartment building in Queens, not in a sprawling, slightly sinister mansion like the one where the Halloran family resides. ~ Victor LaValle

No one wants to learn their history," Jorgen said firmly. "Not all of it. We want our parents to provide but don't want to know what they had to sacrifice to do it. No nation was ever built with kindness. ~ Victor LaValle

If you want to learn the true nature of a child you have to watch how she plays. If you want to learn the true nature of an adult you have to watch how she does her job. ~ Victor LaValle

This wasn't about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. ~ Victor LaValle

Education is gathering information and reading ... No human being can thrive without some form of education. How you get it is up to you - the important thing is that you get it. ~ Victor LaValle

Women only like jerks.' That's the mantra of dudes who have made themselves undateable but aren't willing to take the blame. ~ Victor LaValle

When do things change entirely you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible? It is possible now. You are built to open your fists and show me your palms and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You are built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry and you are a child of my family and my family was made by the world. Here we stand in the dark now and I am old and you are holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We are looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn't be able to parse them. Now look at your own hand and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happens when you clinch your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight. ~ Victor LaValle

All those tales were told right here, one after the next, each informing the one that came after. History isn't a tale told once, it's a series of revisions. ~ Victor LaValle

Do you know how much harm 'happily ever after' has done to mankind? I wish they said something else at the end of those stories instead. 'They tried to be happy.' Or 'Eternal happiness is a fruitless pursuit. ~ Victor LaValle

Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. ~ Victor LaValle

William Kowalski is the kind of storyteller you don't see quite enough these days. The yarn spinner with a generous soul. The Hundred Hearts is a moving, humane adventure about the price of personal connections and the costs of sacrifice. I tore through this bad boy in two short nights. ~ Victor LaValle

People who move to New York always the same mistake. They can't see the place. ~ Victor LaValle

I'm always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don't satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely. ~ Victor LaValle

In the past, a writer had to go outside and get to know others before learning about their work, but the Internet has made humanity more accessible for misanthropes like me. I read blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads where people detail their jobs. ~ Victor LaValle

The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males. ~ Victor LaValle

The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list. ~ Victor LaValle

You had to be rich to risk looking broke. The ~ Victor LaValle

Before September 11, the skinny, jittery black guy made security think one thing: drug mule. But after the attacks, security only cared about bombs. So it was the Arab guys, the Puerto Ricans and Indians, even white men, that got searched. I was too dark to make people worry on a plane. Still caused fear in elevators. ~ Victor LaValle

Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women. ~ Victor LaValle

Because to watch would be to understand the play isn't being staged for us. ~ Victor LaValle

My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion. ~ Victor LaValle

I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October. ~ Victor LaValle

Dig if you will a picture: ~ Victor LaValle

Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name. ~ Victor LaValle

I hadn't stopped fearing the chance of passing on an illness, but that fear had become balanced by the observation that being ill wasn't the same as being beaten. ~ Victor LaValle

I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school. ~ Victor LaValle

Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you're doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh. ~ Victor LaValle

I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York. ~ Victor LaValle

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. ~ Victor LaValle

People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift. ~ Victor LaValle

One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God ... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with ... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level. ~ Victor LaValle

This was one benefit of being a grown man and not a kid: I wanted to impress this woman, but not to the point of getting myself killed. ~ Victor LaValle

I don't know what to say about the hygiene of the male species. ~ Victor LaValle

The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden's 'Number of the Beast' album. ~ Victor LaValle

One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem. ~ Victor LaValle

'Dark Gods,' T. E. D. Klein's book of four novellas, felt like a godsend - even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks. ~ Victor LaValle

There are times when I need to dig up the diagram for a type of satellite dish, for instance, but I just can't seem to phrase this need correctly. As a result, I'm inundated by advertising for satellite television and people's online customer reviews of such services when, in fact, I was only trying to figure out what a certain component is called. ~ Victor LaValle

The shame wasn't in discovering that she had a price; everyone had one of those. Maybe it was just in learning, so concretely, that this was what she cost. ~ Victor LaValle

You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.' ~ Victor LaValle

Lumpy and lazy; I aspired to lethargy. In the second year of university, I missed half my classes just because I couldn't pull myself out of bed. ~ Victor LaValle

It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy. ~ Victor LaValle

I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful. ~ Victor LaValle

I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience. ~ Victor LaValle

Time alone is pornography for people with families. ~ Victor LaValle

In folktales a vampire couldn't enter your home unless you invited him in. Without your consent the beast could never cross your threshold. Well, what do you think your computer is? Your phone? You live inside those devices so those devices are your homes. But at least a home, a physical building, has a door you can shut, windows you can latch. Technology has no locked doors. ~ Victor LaValle

On June 23, 1864, Ambrose Bierce was in command of a skirmish line of Union soldiers at Kennesaw Mountain in northern Georgia. He'd been a soldier for three years and, in that time, had been commended by his superiors for his efficiency and bravery during battle. ~ Victor LaValle