Quotes from Poppy Z. Brite

And what was I if not death's ghostwriter?

I just want to know how you're made," Trevor breathed in his ear. "I love you so much, Zach. I want to climb inside you. I want to taste your brain. I want to feel your heart beating in my hands.

you always felt they were pawns in an indifferent universe, butts of an existential joke with no punch line.

My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.

I've certainly learned a great deal from my husband, though, and could never have written a book like Liquor without him and the people he introduces me to and the stories he brings home.

My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.

I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.

There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!

In high school I was the dog, always, and I never have felt comfortable or right in my body, and part of my whole exhibitionist thing has probably been a way of testing to see whether or not I really was this repulsive creature that I felt like for so long.

My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove.

If you're ever lucky enough to belong somewhere, if a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are things more valuable than life.

This is the point being missed by readers who lament Liquor's lack of hot sex scenes, probably because they aren't old enough to understand that a passionate relationship could be about anything other than sex.

I believe in whatever gets you throught the night. [...] Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four A.M.knows all my secrets.

I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years.

Celebrities, even insignificant ones like me, are created to be abused by the Great Unwashed.

Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.

I've tried to avoid labels, but they always find you.

If you want something, you don't wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.

In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other.

New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.

You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.