Victor LaValle Quotes
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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 best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare.
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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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One of the reasons I love devils so much is not based in my faith, but because as a kid, I grew up loving heavy metal and horror movies, and the devil is such a huge presence in both.
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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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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.
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'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.
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I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
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Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.
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I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels.
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I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.
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I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October.
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It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.
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Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women.
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I couldn't get a date, but I couldn't be quite sure how unattractive I'd become. I was still friendly; I made jokes, and in my mind, if I saw a woman smiling at me... I still had a chance. I did not.
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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.
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There are times when I need to dig up the diagram for a type of satellite dish, for instance, but I just can't seem to phrase this need correctly. As a result, I'm inundated by advertising for satellite television and people's online customer reviews of such services when, in fact, I was only trying to figure out what a certain component is called.
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The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.
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One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
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The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden's 'Number of the Beast' album.
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I hadn't stopped fearing the chance of passing on an illness, but that fear had become balanced by the observation that being ill wasn't the same as being beaten.
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I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.
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'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.
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Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.