Quotes from Scott Spencer

Daniel's mind is a scorpion stinging itself to death.

I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

My first love was everything, all at once. The kind of love you fight for, the kind of boy you fight for.

If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses.

I had known another world. It is impossible to give it a name. There are words like enchantment, words like bliss, but they didn't say it, they were stupid words. No words really said it. There was nothing to say about it except that I had known it, it had been mine. It was the one real thing, more real than the world.

If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared...

It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility - a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.

I was raised in a house on the far South Side of Chicago, in a development erected on a landfill made from slag and other industrial by-products a few years after World War II.

All I wanted was what I'd already had. That exultation, that love. It was my one real home; I was a visitor everywhere else.

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

My first love was everything, all at once. The kind of love you fight for, the kind of boy you fight for.

Like most people, I find my own experiences - and my emotional responses to those experiences - fascinating and mysterious, even those that are a bit shaming and a little repellent.

By the time I was 14, my most burning ambition was to leave my home, leave my neighborhood, leave my city. I kept it a secret wish. It was easier done than said. It wasn't only that I wanted to leave Chicago - I wanted to live in New York City. And I did - for a time.

I try to keep a steady pace with my writing. I have found that super-productive days are usually followed by two and even three days when I can hardly write a word. I used to try for 1000 words a day; now I am high-fiving myself after 500.

Everything in a novel has to be intentional, even the things that aren't.

Writers are stewards of the culture. Publishers, librarians, bookstore owners. We're all in this together. To write books that are gripping, important, that people want to have, is to keep publishing alive.

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

Where I live, it's better to write in the morning because the night is really, really, really dark, and I do believe you'd go mad if you weren't asleep for most of it.