Glen Duncan famous quotes

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.
-- Glen Duncan

#Heart #Ego #Judgement

That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.
-- Glen Duncan

#Hate #Love You #Secret

My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God--then having it taken away, forever.
-- Glen Duncan

#Mother #Taken #Forever

That's the problem with being alive ... You've got to keep thinking of what to do.
-- Glen Duncan

#Life #Thinking #Alive

Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.
-- Glen Duncan

#Life #Party #Yarn

You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.
-- Glen Duncan

#Beauty #Thinking #Forgiving

There is no God and that's His only commandment.
-- Glen Duncan

#There Is No God

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.
-- Glen Duncan

#Character #People #Devil

My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.
-- Glen Duncan

#Children #Believe #Parent

I'm too conceited for therapy.
-- Glen Duncan

#Conceited #Therapy

No artist knows everything... but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.
-- Glen Duncan

#Art #Lying #Omission

Grace only exists to be fallen from.
-- Glen Duncan

#Grace #Fallen

Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.
-- Glen Duncan

#Together #Vices #Perversion

I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.
-- Glen Duncan

#Design #Bears #Should

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
-- Glen Duncan

#Fiction #Want #Entertainment

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.
-- Glen Duncan

#People #Progress

Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.
-- Glen Duncan

#Life #Life Is

Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.
-- Glen Duncan

#Life #Home #Design

Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you're not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the come-down, never the zenith.
-- Glen Duncan

#Zenith #Bliss #Description

What interests me is love, sex, death, cruelty, compassion and the desire for meaning in an apparently godless universe. In other words the human condition.
-- Glen Duncan

#Sex #Compassion #Desire

I don't remember the first image of a werewolf I saw, but I suspect it was the hybrid type, up on two legs, with long limbs, hair, claw-like fingernails and lupine head. To me there's nothing scary about complete transformation from human into wolf. Wolves aren't scary. They're dangerous, yes, but so are geese, in the wrong mood. What's scary is seeing the human in the wolf but knowing it's beyond the reach of reason or emotional appeal. That's where the horror and dread kicks in.
-- Glen Duncan

#Emotional #Hair #Two

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.
-- Glen Duncan

#Home #Draws

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.
-- Glen Duncan

#Mad #Suffering #World

With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.
-- Glen Duncan

#World #Youth #Egotism

I hated the words. Each one was like a big live insect in my mouth.
-- Glen Duncan

#Mouths #Bigs #Insects

No amount of violence you've done to others prepares you for violence done to yourself.
-- Glen Duncan

#Done #Violence

Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.
-- Glen Duncan

#Beautiful #Truth #Ugly

Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.
-- Glen Duncan

#Pain #Ideas #Stupidity

Any seasoned deal maker will tell you that spontaneous negotiation's a bad strategy; the ad hoc approach will leave you ripped-off, busted, conned, stiffed, outsmarted and generally holding the shitty end of the stick.
-- Glen Duncan

#Sticks #Spontaneous #Strategy

One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.
-- Glen Duncan

#Optimism #Idiot #Madness

This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains.
-- Glen Duncan

#Love #Uncles #Reflection

Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.
-- Glen Duncan

#Life #Addiction #Twists

Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.
-- Glen Duncan

#Life #Doe #Plot

I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.....
-- Glen Duncan

#Should

Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.
-- Glen Duncan

#Sibling #Grateful #Long

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.
-- Glen Duncan

#Kindness #Kids #People

For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do... [Lucifer]
-- Glen Duncan

#Discovery #Lucifer #Darling

We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.
-- Glen Duncan

#Past #Self #Arguing

We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.
-- Glen Duncan

#Worst

I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.
-- Glen Duncan

#Lying #Definitions #Unbearable

Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.
-- Glen Duncan

#Differences #Knowing #Making A Difference

Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
-- Glen Duncan

#Life #Mean #Meaningless

Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.
-- Glen Duncan

#Heart #Loving Someone #Laughing

Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.
-- Glen Duncan

#Loss #Currency

The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.
-- Glen Duncan

#Hands #Moved On #Flesh

The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?
-- Glen Duncan

#Religious #Rain #Dark

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.
-- Glen Duncan

#Coffee #Aroma #Existence

Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.
-- Glen Duncan

#Girl #Years #Three

Yes, Eden was beautiful- and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it- so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.)
-- Glen Duncan

#Beautiful #Mean #Animal

I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I'm not sure I ever really liked him.' Adam?' I said. 'I don't blame you.' 'Not Adam,' she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. 'God.
-- Glen Duncan

#Struggle #Blame #Adam

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying.
-- Glen Duncan

#Flower #Silence #Dying

The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
-- Glen Duncan

#Grief #Mean #Wrath

You love life because life's all there is.
-- Glen Duncan

#Love Life

Every present anger derives from past weakness.
-- Glen Duncan

#Anger #Past #Weakness

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.
-- Glen Duncan

#Cities #Snow #Gestures

Time, you'll be pleased to know--and since one must start somewhere--was created in creation. The question What was there before creation? is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
-- Glen Duncan

#Time #Creation #Property

You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because -- now do please be honest with yourself for once -- you'd have left, too.
-- Glen Duncan

#Mean #Men #Ideas

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)
-- Glen Duncan

#Two #Design #Variation

There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.
-- Glen Duncan

#Cancer #Years #Ifs And

The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.
-- Glen Duncan

#Firsts #Horror

Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.
-- Glen Duncan

#Falling In Love #Fall #Process

She understood the genre constraints, the decencies were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured price. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
-- Glen Duncan

#Brother #Grief #Mean

I'm in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.
-- Glen Duncan

#Perception #Deeply In Love

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.
-- Glen Duncan

#Beautiful #Butterfly #Mind

When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.
-- Glen Duncan

#Children #Thinking #Hair

The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.
-- Glen Duncan

#Animal #Sheep #Facts

Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.
-- Glen Duncan

#Focus #Achieve #Renounce

Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.
-- Glen Duncan

#Grace #Hammers #Claws