Quotes from Glen Duncan

What I've absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films.

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.

With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.

Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.

There is no God and that's His only commandment.

You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.

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.

My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God--then having it taken away, forever.

Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.

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

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

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.

Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation.

One of the things that seems absolutely clear to me about werewolves - with their canine makeup - is that they would be dogs, as it were.

If being a werewolf is really a curse, you've got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it.

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.

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

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

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.

Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.