Quotes from Victor LaValle

Education is gathering information and reading... No human being can thrive without some form of education. How you get it is up to you - the important thing is that you get it.

I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.

Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you're doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh.

In the past, a writer had to go outside and get to know others before learning about their work, but the Internet has made humanity more accessible for misanthropes like me. I read blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads where people detail their jobs.

As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.

I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don't have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.

Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.

When I finished graduate school, I had a master's of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book - and almost no marketable skills.

Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.

I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there.

I didn't grow up in a small New England town like the one in 'The Sundial.' I was raised in an apartment building in Queens, not in a sprawling, slightly sinister mansion like the one where the Halloran family resides.

I'm always trying to make myself laugh. I'm the most enthusiastic audience I'm likely to find, so if it doesn't make me smile then it probably won't work on you. The jokes that only make me shrug get cut.

Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

If you want to learn the true nature of a child you have to watch how she plays. If you want to learn the true nature of an adult you have to watch how she does her job.

Social media give me the privilege of learning about more people than I could meet in my whole life. Taken together, the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot, though.

One of the reasons I love devils so much is not based in my faith, but because as a kid, I grew up loving heavy metal and horror movies, and the devil is such a huge presence in both.

'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.

It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.

I couldn't get a date, but I couldn't be quite sure how unattractive I'd become. I was still friendly; I made jokes, and in my mind, if I saw a woman smiling at me... I still had a chance. I did not.

I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels.

In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey.

I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October.

I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.