Victor LaValle Quotes
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Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
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I weighed 25 stone, and I didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as an estate.
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My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
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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.
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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.
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When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction.
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I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful.
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Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently.
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The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.
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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.
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I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York.
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People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.
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Here's the thing: I was charming. Well read and well spoken. Observant and even kind. In other words, I was kind of a catch. And I knew this was true. As long as you couldn't see me. If you saw me, you'd think I was the sea cow that had swallowed your catch.
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Lumpy and lazy; I aspired to lethargy. In the second year of university, I missed half my classes just because I couldn't pull myself out of bed.
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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.
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The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.
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I'm a big fan of monsters. Number one, they're fun, and two, they're such great ways to access the subconscious fears and beliefs of any group of people.
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'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.
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You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'
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In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
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For as long as I could remember, the person in E23 pasted the same Halloween decoration, a witch with a giant wart on her crone's nose, but whenever kids rang, the tenant wouldn't answer. At first, kids figured they'd just missed the guy: bad timing. But it seemed impossible that all of us missed him every year.
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Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives.
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The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.
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There's the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions.