Tony Burgess Quotes & Sayings

They stay like this, in silence, both aware that they have created something together. Defiance. A pushing back of a darkness that no one has ever pushed at before. A wonderful, criminal liberty to love that which has been so viciously called unlovable. — Tony Burgess

I believe the book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life. But it has threatened your life. Not by saying something it believes is true, but by attacking it. — Tony Burgess

The thing he said aloud did not succeed. — Tony Burgess

It's strange to sleep. Sleep is a mysterious thing even in the simplest of people. When you're sleepy, you seem to be getting sick, losing energy, losing clear thought, lying down out of weakness. Then you succumb to the weakness and what happens next resembles death. And then you dream. You abide in a world whose rules are hidden even from you - you who create it. — Tony Burgess

A horror novel should reveal to you that you are falling apart. That there are ways your imagination can be made different. Can threaten what you think is. You should be holding onto that tree or rock screaming. Or laughing. Not at absurdity, either: absurdism is just a bourgeois and reactionary nostalgia for good, stable meaning. — Tony Burgess

My fear, as a writer, is that I am a curiosity. That I can only bring you this peculiar condition from far away, from outside, and if you look at it then it will mean nothing. So, I have to pretend it's more than that. Horror writing lets me do that. — Tony Burgess

And now, no matter what I thought I had done or why I did it, it has become completely untrue because of what I have done since. — Tony Burgess

Maybe I went a bit too far, but that's what people want now. There's an expectation that children be treated poorly in their literature. Everyone wants to see children treated badly. So that ... well, so that when they triumph over evil we all feel lifted up. It's inspirational. — Tony Burgess

I am a feral person. I have no bank account. I am unemployable. I own nothing. I lose my shoes sometimes when I go out. It sounds like I'm making a case for my own exceptionalism, which I suppose I am, but I wish it wasn't true. — Tony Burgess

perhaps, all these years, historians had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral because a spiral was so difficult to describe. was war, then, the big solution after all? war the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenalin, the solvent of ennui, angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? war itself a massive sexual act. -war, finally, the controller, the trimmer & excisor; the justifier of fertility?" --the Wanting Seed/Burgess — Tony Burgess

I think horror should have occult elements, not as its subject but as its ambition. It is a machine that destroys illusion. I, of course, never achieve this, but I always act as if I can. — Tony Burgess

There is a heavy price to pay for writing a bad book. — Tony Burgess

If I told you that everything about you had been just made up by someone, that all of your thoughts, all of your memories, even the things you chose to say had been invented and that they weren't real, that you weren't real, would you believe me? I don't think so. — Tony Burgess

The books are recordings; that's what they have to be, recordings of the writing. They have to be happening to me. — Tony Burgess

I am interested in giving the reader true vertigo. I look to deteriorating consciousness as our inevitable condition and I am trying to make it work the same way I did with my juvenile mind - that is, to imagine how we are suffering. To record it being actual and then virtual. — Tony Burgess

In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn't quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me. — Tony Burgess

As a kid, I couldn't articulate it but I sought out things that could. At first it was horror films - extreme panic and terror, grotesque and maniacal. These films calmed me and made me feel more connected in my experiences. — Tony Burgess

An Underground that knew all about this, knew all about Les, was preparing to wake up the world and invite it to a Canada's Wonderland made of bodies. Giant bloodslides. Houses of torture where children's kidneys are twisted like sponges in the fat hands of musclemen. There would be buns crammed with the cooked knuckles of teenagers, and a king, sitting on a mountain of kings, eating his own shoulder. — Tony Burgess