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When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle
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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.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle -
No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle -
My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle
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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.
Victor LaValle -
I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful.
Victor LaValle -
The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.
Victor LaValle -
I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle
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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.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle -
In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle
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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.
Victor LaValle -
On June 23, 1864, Ambrose Bierce was in command of a skirmish line of Union soldiers at Kennesaw Mountain in northern Georgia. He'd been a soldier for three years and, in that time, had been commended by his superiors for his efficiency and bravery during battle.
Victor LaValle -
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.
Victor LaValle -
People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.
Victor LaValle