Quotes from Glen Duncan

We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

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

Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.

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.

There's no such thing as evil for its own sake . All evil is motivated - even mine {Lucifer}.

I'm in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.

Hell [...] is the absence of God and the presence of Time.

It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I've always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occurring road accident - everyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much . . .

The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.

Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.

I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.....

Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.

Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.

Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.

I find the ideas of Catholicism incredibly rich and inspiring. Bogus, unfortunately, but nonetheless inspiring. I think they always provide an interesting nexus through which to look at the way we are.

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

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

No artist knows everything... but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.

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.

Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.

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

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.