Christopher Bollen Quotes & Sayings

When do the defense measures of a paranoid country become their own agents of self-destruction? — Christopher Bollen

Time was the single asset that every country, every market, depended on. — Christopher Bollen

I smoke cigarettes when I write, which is disgusting, but it really helps me. — Christopher Bollen

I've never even done a residency. — Christopher Bollen

She had no way of evaluating the beauty of someone so young. All young people looked beautiful to her now. — Christopher Bollen

Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father. — Christopher Bollen

I have to say I do read partly for escapism. Why can't I escape and learn something? — Christopher Bollen

My strength is character. I'm pretty good at building walking-talking humans with brains like beehives. — Christopher Bollen

There is a value to moving more slowly through a story. — Christopher Bollen

There's a great scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974] that I'm obsessed with: Sally is being chased by Leatherface with a chainsaw. And she runs into thorn bushes. And she's getting tangled up in it because she's running fast. But Sally needs to move slowly in order to get through the bushes - she will get farther faster by going slowly because her hair and clothes won't get tangled and caught. There's something really beautiful about understanding that, while someone's chasing you with a chainsaw, you have to move more slowly in order to get away. — Christopher Bollen

Both my parents were big readers. — Christopher Bollen

I also remember when I watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1990] at, like, age 15. That scared the crap out of me. Because it didn't operate inside the usual conventions of the horror genre in the way that I could accept. I can accept horny teenager counselors being murdered at camp. But I couldn't accept the derangement of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was that anyone could be murdered at any moment - whole families, with no build-up music and no meaning. It terrified me. — Christopher Bollen

I feel that I'm solid at description. — Christopher Bollen

I was never afraid on stage. That's where I was the least afraid. I could just do what I do and I had the amplification and the lights. — Christopher Bollen

The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It's the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast." She dropped the bee into the terrarium and returned it slowly to the table. "Maybe that's bullshit. I happen to like the beasts. — Christopher Bollen

Art didn't have to provide answers. It only had to ask questions. — Christopher Bollen

Everyone loves a dead artist. It's the living ones that people can't tolerate. — Christopher Bollen

We've come under the influence of television, where in all honesty we can follow a show that could just get cancelled midway through the season and the entire plotline never resolves itself. — Christopher Bollen

Until you write books, you don't realize that the book does decide certain things. It must sound like complete insanity to non-writers. And maybe it is. — Christopher Bollen

I'm convinced I was the only kid ever who had a Death on the Nile [1978] movie poster and a Murder on the Orient Express [1974] movie poster on his bedroom walls. — Christopher Bollen

That's what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud. — Christopher Bollen

There's a structure to a detective story that I can easily understand. I understand playing that particular game. It's like solving a puzzle. Or creating a puzzle. — Christopher Bollen

Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists. — Christopher Bollen

If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in the subject: those future babies would be its next generation of users. — Christopher Bollen

He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which he never had to do when he imagined straight couples having sex. — Christopher Bollen

Today, MTV doesn't play videos anymore, but YouTube certainly has become the next MTV. — Christopher Bollen

No, it's cool," Mills replied. "I don't have a boyfriend. I'm single." It was the first time he had ever defined himself as single, which felt like defining himself as American in a foreign country. It sounded advanced and self-reliant and lonely. — Christopher Bollen

I had been going out to Orient for several years. — Christopher Bollen

A family wasn't forged out of steel. You dig a hole in a person and then you fill it with yourself. — Christopher Bollen

Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don't need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs to get that sensation. — Christopher Bollen

I've always looked like this - in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves? — Christopher Bollen

All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age. — Christopher Bollen

I had lived in New York since 1996, sometimes in the worst neighborhoods, without even locking my door half the time. — Christopher Bollen

Now we're in an age of singles. It's actually always been more about singles for most of music history. — Christopher Bollen

Going out into the country after living in the city is a loss of control. — Christopher Bollen

It's always surprised me that mainstream America had the good taste to like R.E.M. It doesn't have the digestible quality the general public tends to look for in its favorite musicians. — Christopher Bollen

The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town. — Christopher Bollen

They were all impatient for a kill. They wanted to fill their noses with the hot, acrid death that issued from a deer's carcass minutes after it drew its last breath, the smell that allowed them, as men, to tremble momentarily with the sensation of life, its heat and quiet. — Christopher Bollen

Maybe they've been drinking and think it's funny. They're from Cutchogue." Karen seemed to believe the nearby village of Cutchogue was known for its drunken liars. — Christopher Bollen

I have always wanted to be either a cinematographer or a veterinarian. — Christopher Bollen

Do you know what geography really is?" Ted asked. "It's not the shapes of countries or a list of trade routes. Geography is a snapshot of war, plain and simple. It's a record of the state of hostile powers at a moment of suspended animation. — Christopher Bollen

Every time I try to write on vacation, I fail miserably. — Christopher Bollen

To this day I still watch tons of horror. — Christopher Bollen

It is a little out of touch to presume that someone wants to follow your every observation and insight over the course of hundreds of pages without any sort of payoff. That's why writing isn't a one-way street. You have to give something back: an interesting plot, a surprise, a laugh, a moment of tenderness, a mystery for the reader to piece together. — Christopher Bollen

I've never had a mentor. I've always wanted one. I'm actually really disappointed that nobody took my under their wing. — Christopher Bollen

Looking back, [R.E.M.]videos, by in large, have always been art films. I'm thinking of "Losing My Religion." That's a landmark piece. — Christopher Bollen

Your little eco-friendly fairy tale ain't going to happen. This was farming land long before it was cute-house land. — Christopher Bollen

You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it. — Christopher Bollen

Critics like mailmen delivering unwanted news. — Christopher Bollen

The ocean tries to flood a boat, fire wants to eat the wood, the mind wills to regret, and silence shapes a landscape more deftly than sound - all of that was true. — Christopher Bollen

Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay. — Christopher Bollen

They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles. — Christopher Bollen

Tommy was tall and wide-hipped, but Mills couldn't tell what kind of body lay underneath the black T-shirt and jeans, what kind of person, what kind of smell or ability to reach over in the dark. There were certain things a person could only learn by touching someone else. — Christopher Bollen

I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980]. — Christopher Bollen

There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they've met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who's lived the most." "Isn't that called Facebook? — Christopher Bollen

Why I love chess and tennis - the volleying aspect, and the fact that your competitors' reactions and motivations and bluffs come into the game itself. — Christopher Bollen

I'm ultimately not so much of a professor as a progresser. And I'm ready to move away from what I consider to be this weird mid-century dream that I feel pulls us as a country, and us as a culture, backward. — Christopher Bollen

It's families that stop people. All they're good for is guilt. — Christopher Bollen

Women had cup sizes to track their development. Men had a ruler and hope. — Christopher Bollen

I wanted to reexamine the idea of the album for generations of people who are not my age, who love music or learning about music or are finding this band called R.E.M. or have just previously heard "Losing My Religion" and "Everybody Hurts" as their elevator music. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the age of YouTube and the Internet. — Christopher Bollen

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature. — Christopher Bollen

There's also something sexual about watching the nubile girl in terror. But you do take on her fear as your own. — Christopher Bollen

In a lot of ways, work was my graduate school. — Christopher Bollen

All close friendships are marked with competition. Our earliest tests are against our siblings and playmates, and some of that rivalry endures amongst friends into adulthood. Like dogs play fighting, you learn not to bite hard. — Christopher Bollen

Paul needed to come out, not as gay or straight, but as human. — Christopher Bollen

But wasn't there always a someone once for everyone? — Christopher Bollen

An album for me as a teenager in the '70s was a fully formed concept. It was a body of work from an artist I liked or trusted or who excited me. Maybe one of the songs is really poppy and you listen to it on the radio as a hit single and then more of the world is about to find out about this artist by buying the record. — Christopher Bollen

I was a very scared child. — Christopher Bollen

Why was a person's exact cause of death so often more fascinating than what they did with their life? Because it explained how they suffered, Mills thought, because it was a reminder that everyone suffers in the end. — Christopher Bollen

You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle. — Christopher Bollen

We lost so many talented artists and writers from the generations before ours that we're really lacking older figureheads. — Christopher Bollen

My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession. — Christopher Bollen

It's all a fucking trap, owning things, places, people. The way I see it, we don't own things. We get owned. — Christopher Bollen

I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time. — Christopher Bollen

I want to sleep with people, steal, get run out of town, leave my fingerprints on every scene. We have a name for it, our generation. It's our Baghdad."
"Your what?"
"My Baghdad," Tommy said laughing, knowing it was dumb, savoring the dumbness, and maybe also its truth. "The situation you get into knowing it's fucked-up but you keep doing it anyway, making it an even bigger disaster. Everyone gets one, but that's how you learn. It builds character, makes you dirty and real. You know you're a superpower when you can lose every war and still be a superpower. Maybe you're a superpower because you can afford to lose them. Same here. There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they've met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who's lived the most."
"Isn't that called Facebook?" Mills asked. — Christopher Bollen

These are the males," she said. Beth leaned in to examine it. "Any stimulation," Magdalena said, and finished the thought by gently rubbing her fingers together. The bee's hoary tail split open, and a thin, stamenlike organ shot out and curled. "Like all males, harmless and easily aroused." She laughed. "It's the females you have to be careful about. — Christopher Bollen

To discover someone was ordinary always struck Mills as a kind of betrayal. Whenever a man Mills presumed was gay turned out to be straight, the aura about him crumbled, the clues reassembling into the most indistinctive brand of human being - normal, hiding nothing, a mind like a weather vane that moved with the prevailing winds. — Christopher Bollen

I was obsessed with Agatha Christie in sixth grade. — Christopher Bollen

I'm not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I'm offering a whole new variety of services, plural - water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren't being poisoned in your own home. — Christopher Bollen

Condom," she said. He grabbed a gold square off his nightstand, tore it open, and milked the rubber down his shaft. These were awkward seconds for a man, no matter how attractive the woman under him appeared - legs open, breasts resting on the rib cage - because a man has to stay hard while the woman watches in some negative quiet where irrevocable judgments are formed. — Christopher Bollen

You don't realize how old you've become until someone young comes around to remind you. — Christopher Bollen

The death drive is parasitic. It runs off of other drives, leeching off of them. — Christopher Bollen

Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me. — Christopher Bollen

I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day. — Christopher Bollen

There's something about fear and aesthetic that go hand in hand. — Christopher Bollen

As much as I adore Agatha Christie - and I think people make this claim about murder mysteries in general - it's often a very conservative mode of storytelling. Usually it's the greedy, climbing, new-money slimeball who wants to take from the aristocracy. — Christopher Bollen

One day I want to write a full-on horror book. — Christopher Bollen

My parents were great parents, but for some bizarre reason they allowed me to watch whatever I wanted on TV, we had cable. And I constantly watched horror movies. — Christopher Bollen

Was there anything as innocent as willful self-destruction? — Christopher Bollen