Quotes from Glen Duncan

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

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.

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

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.

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 .)

There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can't ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it's quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia's the sane realisation you just can't be doing with all that anymore.

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)

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.

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

No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.

I find I still adore walking. Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting one foot in front of the other and so on - but there you are.

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.

You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.

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.

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying.

The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

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.

Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.

He was always teasing me about not reading books, but one day he said: Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.

The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do . . .

Then what happened next happened.

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?

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.

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.