Glen Duncan Quotes

The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.

~ Glen Duncan

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

~ Glen Duncan

Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche's ghostly script?

~ Glen Duncan

It’s why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn’t have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.

~ Glen Duncan

Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one.Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on 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.

~ Glen Duncan

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

~ Glen Duncan

How was the light today?”“Big. Hot. Yellow-white. The sky’s blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone’s hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes.

~ Glen Duncan

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.

~ Glen Duncan

You love life because life's all there is.

~ Glen Duncan

Life's generally artless, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind yor back, and before you know it you're in a final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror-movine, usually...

~ Glen Duncan

Nothing is the whole story. The self’s curse – and the writer’s.

~ 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.

~ Glen Duncan

You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn't. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you'll find it a room.

~ Glen Duncan

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

~ Glen Duncan

Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.

~ Glen Duncan

The lies you tell yourself. The necessary lies.

~ Glen Duncan

It wasn't love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,' Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he'd found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.

~ Glen Duncan

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

~ Glen Duncan

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

~ Glen Duncan

All vampires smoke. Smoking’s high on the list of Things You Take Up To Pass The Time.

~ Glen Duncan

It’s Big Brother with werewolves. Live coverage for a month, leading up to a group kill on full moon.

~ Glen Duncan

... vampire ruler Hin Kahur implemented howler aversion therapy.

~ Glen Duncan

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.

~ Glen Duncan

Where ever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood.

~ Glen Duncan

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

~ Glen Duncan

Werewolves are not a subject for academe,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in the concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.

~ Glen Duncan

For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable 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...[Lucifer]

~ Glen Duncan

Comedy, of course, lives for serious moments.

~ Glen Duncan

It rewrites the contract, I'd read somewhere. Your self's no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.

~ Glen Duncan

There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

~ Glen Duncan

You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn't strike you down. The sky didn't fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out... It was still good when you raised your arm for a cab and one came towards you out of the flow like magic. You did things that were supposed to end you and found they were only things that changed you. It was a disappointment and a revelation and a bereavement and a new thrilling nudity. It was the basic prosaic obscenity: You kept going.

~ Glen Duncan

The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

~ Glen Duncan

Whatever doesn't kill them, makes them make reality TV shows...

~ Glen Duncan

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities.

~ Glen Duncan

I've always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It's hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever if felt like it you'd learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can't blame women.

~ Glen Duncan

Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to?

~ Glen Duncan

If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you’d be miserable poor.

~ Glen Duncan

If being a werewolf is really a curse, you've got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it.

~ Glen Duncan

Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.

~ Glen Duncan

We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.

~ Glen Duncan