Victor LaValle Quotes
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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.
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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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'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.
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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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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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I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
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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 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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Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.
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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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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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It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.
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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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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 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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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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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 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 know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.
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Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.
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'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.