Glen Duncan Quotes & Sayings

I haven't won any prizes or had any best sellers. — Glen Duncan

Everyone is obsessed with air fresheners. We associate smell with disgust. But we're all locked into the body; we can't escape it. — Glen Duncan

The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For you, my darlings, freedom to do 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 ... — Glen Duncan

The Mortals are free, Lucifer. What they've done they've done from within themselves. - Raphael — Glen Duncan

Catholicism fascinated him, the contortions it put itself through to make ends meet. Father Murray had kept returning to the word 'despair.' There'd been a little (bizarre, Luke thought) linguistic diversion into Latin. Desperare, formed by the 'de' prefex, signifying the removal of or from, and 'sperare,' meaning to hope. The removal of hope. That was despair. The reasoning being that you couldn't live without hope. What Murray hadn't said (but what, along with the story of the suicide ghost, Luke remembered from childhood) was that despair was classified as a sin against the Holy Spirit. That was the perverse beauty of the religion: that your daughter could be raped and murdered and yourself still condemned for giving up hope. — Glen Duncan

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

Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses... — Glen Duncan

It's the inner life that fucks up relationships. — Glen Duncan

The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. — Glen Duncan

This would be my torture: all that didn't bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it. — Glen Duncan

You ok?" he said.
No, I'm not. I'm lonely and exhausted and no kind of mother and on top of all that migrained with fucking idiotic desire.
"I'm fine," I said, and opened the passenger door. — Glen Duncan

I waited. Nothing. Here again was the colossal silence where God's, someone's, anyone's voice should have been. Learn this lesson now, my brother said, I shan't teach it twice. There is nothing. It means nothing. Then the night exhaled and flowed again. I knew with clairvoyant weariness I'd go back countless times to the question of why, how, but knew too I carried the answer inside. It had gone in like an inhaled spec of toxic dust. Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be. — Glen Duncan

The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity. — Glen Duncan

She hated the predictability of herself, but knew life probably wouldn't be long enough for her to grow out of it. — Glen Duncan

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

Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate their efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn't go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who'd taken their lives and devoured them, into you. — Glen Duncan

He'd seen her not really recognising him, not really, when it came down to it, caring who he was. It was disgusting, that pain could do that. What was the point of it, except to shame and disgust everyone? To make a mockery of love? If that was God then fuck God, whether there was a reason for it or not. If there was a reason then fuck the reason. No kind of reason he was interested in any more. — Glen Duncan

You're fond, I imagine of your right eye? I mean, you've gone to the trouble of putting make up on it. — Glen Duncan

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

You have a good cry, lovey, you'll feel better afterwards. You did feel better afterwards, but as if you'd conned yourself, fobbed yourself off. — Glen Duncan

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

From a floor below someone was singing with a karaoke machine, Paul McCartney's 'Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time,' completely out of tune. 'Beyond doubt the worst Christmas song ever written,' New York said to me, quietly. 'Like a request to God to end the universe. — Glen Duncan

It's no surprise to him what any government does, least of all his own. — Glen Duncan

The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her after my death. Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don't you'll have what you need. Just promise me you'll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay. — Glen Duncan

Shoved by shock too young into the truth that nothing meant anything. — Glen Duncan

But wulf did what it does: Simply insisted. Simply burned through. Simply defied. The same shrugging, grinning continuance. The nature of life. The nature of the beast. — Glen Duncan

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

I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me. — Glen Duncan

The only way to be sure of never losing the ones you love. The Dahmer Method. Extreme, but effective. — Glen Duncan

Nothing apparently, disturbed the mans air of having his mind on something more important than you. You wanted to slap him. — Glen Duncan

There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems. — Glen Duncan

I counted seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room. — Glen Duncan

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

He was a blessing in my life. My life was full of blessings. And one curse: That no amount of blessings was ever enough. — Glen Duncan

The yeehaw explanation is we're too busy chasing meat'n'pussy. — Glen Duncan

Fuck the miracle of life, where do I sign up for a hysterectomy? — Glen Duncan

... vampire ruler Hin Kahur implemented howler aversion therapy. — Glen Duncan

The beauty of the concept is that it takes the wind out of so many would-be ethical sails: the company that owns the porn-mag owns the company that makes the washing powder. The company that owns the munitions plants owns the company that makes the budgerigar food. The company that owns the nuclear waste owns the company that picks up your trash. These days, thanks to me, unless you pack up and go and live in a cave, you're putting money into evil and shit. And let's be realistic, if the cost of ethics is life in a cave ... — Glen Duncan

The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad, and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis. — Glen Duncan

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

Hot tip: If you're a human having a fling with a werewolf, break it off. Now. — Glen Duncan

And saying it
the first time we say it and mean it
we cross over into that other world that has so far been no more than a suspicion or a dream. Saying it, we enter the golden realm where the old structures of doubt and the agony of incompleteness disappear, and the utterance itself is the first bright rung on the ladder of new possibility. What a relief! What a joyous relief from the distinctive weight of your own soul, to be able to look unguardedly into the eyes of another and say it, meaning it and heady with knowing you mean it: "I love you." If the wind had blown through me at that moment, my body would have sung like a chime. — Glen Duncan

I'd made her American, and something about her relationship with the luggage and the raincoat and the purse reinforced this, the casual entitlement to useful things. — Glen Duncan

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write. — Glen Duncan

Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died. — Glen Duncan

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

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

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

This had occurred to me. But for no reason I can dignify with anything higher than the authority of a two-hundred-year-old gut I didn't buy it.
"It's possible," I said. "Of course it's possible." "But you don't think so" "No. I'm not sure why."
Another silence, her intelligence working. Then a very slight smile. "It's because it would be less romantic," she said. — Glen Duncan

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

She turned towards me, put her fingertips against my chest. She was enjoying it somewhat, too, the little betrayal of Mark's memory. She still loved him, differently; now and again there must be these retrospective cruelties, to consolidate her newness, to let her not love him in the old way. — Glen Duncan

I'm constantly dogged with a feeling of fraudulence, so if somebody tells me they like what I've written, then I immediately begin to think it's rubbish. — Glen Duncan

Moll is immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heartless, a bad woman: yet Moll is marvellous. — Glen Duncan

Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life. — Glen Duncan

I'm still bothered.
You're French. If you lot stopped bothering the coffee and tobacco industries would collapse. — Glen Duncan

It's a ridiculous story, of course, but history's full of ridiculous stories. 'You can't make this shit up,' one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don't ask me. I just work here. — Glen Duncan

I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language. — Glen Duncan

In my dreams a small wolf slept inside of me and it wasn't comfortable. It moved it's heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what it was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I'd wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up and touch the muzzle that wasn't there. — Glen Duncan

Reader, I ate him. — Glen Duncan

Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to? — Glen Duncan

No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission. — Glen Duncan

Don't kill me - you fucking cunt.
Hot tip. If you're trying to get someone to not kill you, avoid calling him a fucking cunt. — Glen Duncan

A lovely young girl lies on a bed in the dark listening to a fairy tale," I said. "But she's naked and the storyteller's hands are all over her. — Glen Duncan

That's the problem with being alive," she says, staring at the floor. "You've got to keep thinking of what to do. — Glen Duncan

I still want magic, I find. The old fashioned kind. I don't believe in it, but I still have a hankering for it. — Glen Duncan

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that. — Glen Duncan

I said. "But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy." No exaggeration. Harley's [book] collection's worth a million-six ... — Glen Duncan

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

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. — Glen Duncan

Suddenly, he missed her, their shared history. The way they remained tuned to each other across a room full of people. He's look up and see her green eyes glance at him. Yes. I know. Us. They'd known there was nothing novel about it as far as the world was concerned; they'd known it was only love, which the world had seen billions of times before. Or rather Cheryl had known. He'd never considered it. Having fallen in love with her he'd realised love was what he's been waiting for. The question of what he [i]wanted[/i] out of life had been answered. Whereas Cheryl had space left over. It was one of the differences between them. It was what kept him striving towards her. — Glen Duncan

In the face of every reason for breaking don't break because if nothing, absolutely nothing else I'm here with my hand on you. You're not alone. — Glen Duncan

The Russian drove. New York turned in his seat to make sure I wasn't peeking. He should have been a surfer. His face was full of masculine prettiness and immensely likeable. Which, by horror's law of inverted aesthetics, made me sure we were being taken to our deaths. — Glen Duncan

The moment you think is unbearable forces you to disappoint yourself by bearing it. There's resigned laughter available, for the hilarity of your own durability. — Glen Duncan

I find I still adore walking. Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting one foot in front of the other and so on - but there you are. — Glen Duncan

There were so many things I liked. That was the awful thing about being alive: there were so many things one liked. The awful thing about life was that there were so many thingsm full stop. — Glen Duncan

That was the treachery of suffering. It took you to the point from which you thought death must follow, then let you know it could hold you there indefinitely. That was when you stopped fearing death and started wanting it, praying for it, begging for it. — Glen Duncan

Do you know how few men there are worth having? — Glen Duncan

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

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

There are, I'm depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt. — Glen Duncan

Werewolves are not the subject of academe," she said, "but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. 'Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We've seen ourselves in concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we've read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there's no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It's been us all along. — Glen Duncan

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much. — Glen Duncan

You give thanks for small things. I gave thanks that I was wearing jeans, not a skirt. People start trying to kill you, you stop wearing skirts. — Glen Duncan

Temptation's less about wearing someone down with repetition than it is about finding the right phrase and dropping it in at the right time. — Glen Duncan

It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I've always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occurring road accident - everyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much ... — Glen Duncan

Life, the dramatist of 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

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

For a long time, I'd wanted to write a book that I would be proud and happy and psychologically and morally comfortable about my parents' reading. — Glen Duncan

I am a man of lost faiths. — Glen Duncan

I used to believe in signs, omens, patterns, secret purpose, synchronicities. — Glen Duncan

For almost a decade I was haunted by the memory of Deborah Black, I was about to claim. But the memory didn't haunt me; I haunted the memory. Went to it, at night or in the deadened hours of empty afternoons, woke it up, reminded it of all the fun we'd had, made it do things with me. — Glen Duncan

No such thing as destiny. But Fluff had come after me, not her
and it had brought the two of them together anyway. It was impossible to write it off as a series of accidents. Both ideas impossible to believe and impossible to dismiss. Which is what he's told me Christ knows how many times before, about the signs, the connections, the correspondence between things, the goddamned beguilement. You have to both believe it and know it can't be true, he'd said. You have to learn how to be the wry servant of two masters. I'd been so annoyed, I'd said: Yeah. I've never know what the fuck 'wry' actually means. — Glen Duncan

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

When something happened that was everything to you you realized it was nothing to everything else. — Glen Duncan

For the minimum-wager with Caligulan needs, the glory days are soon over. — Glen Duncan

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

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

There are things you think you won't be able to do, that need the actual to become possible. There are things that only become thinkable once you're already doing them. — Glen Duncan

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

But all the while and all the while and all the while the world. — Glen Duncan