Quotes from Glen Duncan

Expect nothing and you don't need the courage to hope, nor the strength to withstand disappointment when nothing comes.

I counted seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room.

The pornologue's mantric (as is the Athanasian Creed, for that matter) sucking her down to a level of herself where no questions are asked, where her history evaporates, where her self bleeds painlessly into the void.

Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died.

One knows one's madness, 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.

Simultaneously (in the inner voice of a female American cultural studies professor): 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.

There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.

You give thanks for small things. I gave thanks that I was wearing jeans, not a skirt. People start trying to kill you, you stop wearing skirts.

I'm still bothered. You're French. If you lot stopped bothering the coffee and tobacco industries would collapse.

Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English.

For the love of Mary, I get it, she's got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try'n get back into it.

Like her, he didn't buy the Nietzschean line that whatever didn't kill you made you stronger. Sometimes whatever didn't kill you disfigured and debilitated you for the rest of your life instead of killing you. Mere survival was neither here nor there. It was the manner of survival, what you did with whatever it was that didn't kill you.

This would be my torture: all that didn't bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.

I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.

Embrace determinism and you're chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.

A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale," I said. "But she's naked and the storyteller's hands are all over her.

All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.

By all means, become an abomination--but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

The moment demanded action and all we had was paralysis.

I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language.

This, of course, is the crux. It doesn't really matter what the language is, only whether there's a transcendent moral grammar underpinning it. No one really cares what hell's called or who runs it. They just don't want to go there.

The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity.

From a floor below someone was singing with a karaoke machine, Paul McCartney's 'Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time,' completely out of tune. 'Beyond doubt the worst Christmas song ever written,' New York said to me, quietly. 'Like a request to God to end the universe.

Life, the dramatist of speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.