Victor LaValle Quotes
-
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.
-
My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction.
-
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.
-
I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful.
-
People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.
-
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.
-
The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'
-
'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.
-
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.
-
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'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.
-
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.
-
One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level.
-
It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.
-
No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.
-
In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
-
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.
-
'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.