Hal Duncan Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 65 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Hal Duncan.
Famous Quotes By Hal Duncan
For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like. — Hal Duncan
AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy. Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh? — Hal Duncan
Science fiction long assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (much to its benefit), while fantasy long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (much to my boredom). — Hal Duncan
No, we're not prisoners of flesh, I think, bound in our skins, and only waiting for the final judgment that will send us into fire or light. We're fucking prisoners of conscience, prisoners of fear and shame. We're fucking prisoners of sorrow, and it's time for our release. — Hal Duncan
One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum. — Hal Duncan
It's the doors that make a prison, he says, not the walls. The doors you don't even try to open. — Hal Duncan
A 3K word story might well be done in some caffeine-and-nicotine-fuelled 36 hour session, and at the end of it, there'll be a few passes of editing required, but I basically have a polished draft. — Hal Duncan
- Come Inanna, enter, Neti said to her, and as Inanna entered the first gate, the sugurra, crown of the steppe, was taken from her head.
- What is this? asked Inanna
- Quiet, Inanna, she was told. The customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned. — Hal Duncan
You want a crime to torture yourself for, try cowardice. The only sin that ever mattered a shit is the shame that put us all here. Fuck, I didn't give you that power just so you could judge yourselves. I gave you the power so you could judge God. — Hal Duncan
Ray Bradbury's entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of SCIENCE FICTION into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror. — Hal Duncan
Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level. — Hal Duncan
In a spectaculist fabrication, the cardinal rule is Shit Blows Up. — Hal Duncan
Cause what do groanhuffs know? All's they've done is heard our tales and passed em along in a game of Chinese Whispers, getting em all mixed up, like. — Hal Duncan
So, fuck 'em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We're GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker's jackets. — Hal Duncan
So the question is ... You wanna be a Scruffian or not? — Hal Duncan
In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire? — Hal Duncan
Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets. — Hal Duncan
Well, I myself, while sometimes unkempt by nights of drunkenness and debauchery, am quite convinced a man's good character is marked by his impeccable attire. — Hal Duncan
Jack in and jerk off, kid! You too can save the world ... from those evil, bug-eyed commies from space! — Hal Duncan
A ship with two of every animal in the world, my friend? That would have to be a very large ship indeed. Is that how you would save a world? A bull and a cow, a sheep and a ram, and so on? The people who wrote your Torah, my friend, must have had poor livestock if they raised their herds from only one dam and one sire, breeding sisters with their brothers, any herdsman knows that this does not produce a healthy flock.
No, my friend to save the world you save the knowledge of that world, the knowledge that there were bulls and cows in it, that there were sheep and rams in it, that there were men and women who lived and died. If your world is to be destroyed, all you can save my friend, is the knowledge of it, to restore what you once had, to mourn what can never be restored. — Hal Duncan
Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake. — Hal Duncan
Prejudice validates itself as righteous abhorrence of the criminally deviant. So Christian homophobia is just a metonym of that abjection in general. — Hal Duncan
Popular and unpopular don't necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course. — Hal Duncan
Come Neti, my chief keeper of the gates of Kur, and listen carefully to what I say: Lock up and bolt the seven gates of Kur, then, one by one, open each gate and let Innana enter through the crack. Bring her down. But as she enters, take her regal costume from her, take the crown, the necklace, and the beads that fall across her breast, the golden breastplate on her chest, the bracelet and the rod and line. Strip her of everything, even the royal robe, and let the holy priestess of the earth, the queen of heaven, enter here bowed low. — Hal Duncan
I've got a number of stories written so far in that mythos, more lined up to be written, and a narrative arc taking shape between them. I was experimenting with releasing the stories online for Paypal donations, so the existing ones are currently available via the blog for free download, but the ball didn't keep rolling in terms of meeting the targets I was setting. — Hal Duncan
For many readers, writers, editors and agents ... pretty much the working (in)definition: SF is short for So Fuck? — Hal Duncan
Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice. — Hal Duncan
Man, that's a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we're not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement denial that we've got anything to do with the crack-whore pump-daddy beast of a thousand cocks locked in the closet. Bitter accusations of snootcocking snipewankery when they point out that crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks in the closet. Offended outrage when they assume the mindfuck we're touting is a cheap handjob, just because we're, like, standing on a street corner dressed to sell our arses. And because our first words to a prospective customer just happens to be, 'Hey, big boy. — Hal Duncan
The conflict between pacifism and socialism ultimately reflects a greater quandary of how one engages with such a system. — Hal Duncan
Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse. — Hal Duncan
The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe. — Hal Duncan
The crescent sun is high, the moon low;
life is not for the faint-hearted;
so why the fuck should art be? — Hal Duncan
Brain out, sponge in' fiction. — Hal Duncan
We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit. — Hal Duncan
I'm sort of exploring where pacifism and socialism come into conflict. How do you reconcile a passionate rejection of might and violence with an attitude of "nil paseran" - "none shall pass" - in the face of fascism? — Hal Duncan
Losing maturity in one's fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that's not always a bad thing. — Hal Duncan
A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old films, he said
when you see this old parchment map just ... getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just ... fwoom. — Hal Duncan
Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings. — Hal Duncan
We are our own worst enemies. How banal and trite that sounds, but [ ... ] have come to believe that all the greatest truths are trite and banal, when spoken aloud in their simplest and most honest terms. Perhaps they can only be imparted in the Cant, in a language which writes itself onto your heart so that you understand not just the words but all the shattering ramifications of of a sentence which, when heard without true understanding, seems quite risibly simplistic.
We are our own worst enemies.
People die. — Hal Duncan
Fuck, if only 'aesthetic idiom' didn't sound so damn poncy. — Hal Duncan
So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners. — Hal Duncan
I started thinking about the endless bullshit about quotas, and how certain types of character are fine "as long as it's important to the story," and so on, started thinking about the absence of the abject. — Hal Duncan
I likes me some 'Shit Blows Up' fiction, don't get me wrong. — Hal Duncan
Civility and etiquette, gentlemen, are all important. — Hal Duncan
I wanted to do justice to texts that are in verse in their original, so I tried to invest my version with a comparable poetic power; hence even more literary fireworks there. — Hal Duncan
But functional was not an aesthetic criterion that Flashjack, as a faery, had terribly high on his list of priorities; it was well below shiny and nowhere near weird. — Hal Duncan
I'd take you home with me, see, but two of us in the same Behold? Just wouldn't work, ends up in all sorts of squabbles over interior design; and the human, well, one faery in the Behold of the Eye, that just gives them a little twinkle of imagination, but more than one and it's like a bloody fireworks display. They get all unstable and artistic, blinded by the glamour of everything, real or imagined, concrete or abstract. They get confused between beauty and truth and meaning, you see, start thinking every butterfly-brained idea must be true; before you know it they've gone schizo on you and you're in a three-way firefight with all the angels and the demons, them and their bloody ideologies. — Hal Duncan
This is the fiction that I'm referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative. — Hal Duncan
Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we're talking now, not factuality but possibility. — Hal Duncan
I kissed the boys and made them cry ... in ecstasy. — Hal Duncan
With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel-Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss-and you have urban fantasy at its best. — Hal Duncan
Movies, novels, TV shows - these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we're turned away, sent to the ghetto. — Hal Duncan
The quirky flavourings of the idiosyncratic ideologue ultimately drowned in the ketchup of redheaded twins and nipples that go spung. — Hal Duncan
But the bigots always see those whom they hate as morally corrupt, as if they confuse their own aesthetics of disgust and fear with actual ethical critique, rationalizing their emotional response, and enforcing their moral certainties with passion, establishing them-selves, subtly or brutally, as arbiters of reason. — Hal Duncan
Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that's been brewing since Cervantes. — Hal Duncan
See, you have the choice we didn't. You wanna think about it though, you do, before you decide to throw your lot in with us. Cause it's not just about living in society's stitches, you know, the bits in between, the squats and secret places. It's about being Fixed. — Hal Duncan
Personally, I'd like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it's going to be so overloaded with meanings it's just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink. — Hal Duncan
In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn't matter if you're filthy. In theory anyway. — Hal Duncan
All worlds of fiction are alternative realities. — Hal Duncan
Hope is determination, you think. Hope is desperation. Hope is a yearning you can't deny. And hope is just plain old-fashioned insanity. — Hal Duncan