74 quotes found
Author · British · 1965
British author
“The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.”
“You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.”
“Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psy...”
“It’s why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn’t have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.”
“Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one.Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows...”
“Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.”
“How was the light today?”“Big. Hot. Yellow-white. The sky’s blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone’s hand was pulling it, ver...”
“I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.”
“You love life because life's all there is.”
“Life's generally artless, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind yor back, and before you know it you're in a final act of a lousy movie. A lous...”
“Nothing is the whole story. The self’s curse – and the writer’s.”
“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.”
“You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn't. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you'll find it a room.”
“The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.”
“Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.”
“The lies you tell yourself. The necessary lies.”
“It wasn't love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,' Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible...”
“By all means, become an abomination--but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.”
“All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.”
“All vampires smoke. Smoking’s high on the list of Things You Take Up To Pass The Time.”