Famous Quotes & Sayings

Victor LaValle Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Victor LaValle.

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Famous Quotes By Victor LaValle

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Lumpy and lazy; I aspired to lethargy. In the second year of university, I missed half my classes just because I couldn't pull myself out of bed. — Victor LaValle

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There are people who say life is dull. Just a series of mundane events. But I can't agree. Things happen. Bet on that. — Victor LaValle

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Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant--these were useful tricks for a black man in a white neighborhood. Survival techniques. — Victor LaValle

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Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny. — Victor LaValle

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Think of King Jesus as our greatest doubter. Who saw the order of society and taught us to defy it. Who saw the ugly urges in ourselves and taught us to resist them. As we navigate through the powerful tides, doubt is our rudder. — Victor LaValle

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The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth.
Was this the heart I wanted measured? — Victor LaValle

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I'm a big fan of monsters. Number one, they're fun, and two, they're such great ways to access the subconscious fears and beliefs of any group of people. — Victor LaValle

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Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you're doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh. — Victor LaValle

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Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves. — Victor LaValle

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I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier. — Victor LaValle

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I didn't grow up in a small New England town like the one in 'The Sundial.' I was raised in an apartment building in Queens, not in a sprawling, slightly sinister mansion like the one where the Halloran family resides. — Victor LaValle

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People hear that you grew up religious, and they can't imagine you'd have a complex relationship with faith. If you believe one part, you must believe it all. But who gets more chances to see the absurdities than the devout? An answer that's satisfying on Sunday becomes contradictory by Wednesday night. Belief is a wrestling match that lasts a lifetime. — Victor LaValle

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That most natural human appetite, the hunger for somewhere else. — Victor LaValle

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This wasn't about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. — Victor LaValle

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The profession is never going back to those days when a handful of wealthy people treated publishing like a hobby: one where the business can lose money because the family has lots of it to burn. Frankly, I don't think that model was ever sustainable, and it really only enriched a small number of writers. — Victor LaValle

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There were others who would have called him a scammer, a swindler, a con, but he never thought of himself this way. No good charlatan ever did. — Victor LaValle

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You had to be rich to risk looking broke. The — Victor LaValle

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No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve. — Victor LaValle

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When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction. — Victor LaValle

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I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October. — Victor LaValle

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Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world. — Victor LaValle

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I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don't have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people. — Victor LaValle

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A little style is a good thing, but you can't trust a person who won't be ugly in front of you. — Victor LaValle

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I weighed 25 stone, and I didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as an estate. — Victor LaValle

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Time alone is pornography for people with families. — Victor LaValle

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As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs. — Victor LaValle

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Dig if you will a picture: — Victor LaValle

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The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice. — Victor LaValle

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Stupid people had a few authors in common: Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel. What nonsense. Such dreck. — Victor LaValle

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Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly. — Victor LaValle

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I'm always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don't satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely. — Victor LaValle

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The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list. — Victor LaValle

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Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need. They — Victor LaValle

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I realise I might pass down an incurable illness to my son, but living based on what might go wrong seems like less and less of a life as I get older. The one thing I can try to control is whether I teach my child to be ruled by anxiety, by fear. That's something that gets passed down, too. — Victor LaValle

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You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.' — Victor LaValle

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I'll take Cthulhu over you devils any day. — Victor LaValle

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It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy. — Victor LaValle

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My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion. — Victor LaValle

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Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing. — Victor LaValle

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For as long as I could remember, the person in E23 pasted the same Halloween decoration, a witch with a giant wart on her crone's nose, but whenever kids rang, the tenant wouldn't answer. At first, kids figured they'd just missed the guy: bad timing. But it seemed impossible that all of us missed him every year. — Victor LaValle

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I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York. — Victor LaValle

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I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful. — Victor LaValle

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It's easier to hold onto a bad idea if you never share it, and it's harder to defend one if you let it out. — Victor LaValle

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In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long. — Victor LaValle

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Human beings are no damn good," he said. "We are even worse than animals. We like ... "
He trailed off, cleared his throat, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.
"We like monsters," he said. — Victor LaValle

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William Kowalski is the kind of storyteller you don't see quite enough these days. The yarn spinner with a generous soul. The Hundred Hearts is a moving, humane adventure about the price of personal connections and the costs of sacrifice. I tore through this bad boy in two short nights. — Victor LaValle

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This was one benefit of being a grown man and not a kid: I wanted to impress this woman, but not to the point of getting myself killed. — Victor LaValle

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Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed. — Victor LaValle

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Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. — Victor LaValle

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Seeing America by bus is like touring the Louvre in a Porta Potti. — Victor LaValle

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Fuck the meek. The despised will inherit the earth! — Victor LaValle

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In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey. — Victor LaValle

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In the past, a writer had to go outside and get to know others before learning about their work, but the Internet has made humanity more accessible for misanthropes like me. I read blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads where people detail their jobs. — Victor LaValle

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'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. — Victor LaValle

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Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building. — Victor LaValle

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I have my teachers who tell me what to do. I'm not quite old enough yet to be truly independent. — Victor LaValle

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I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there. — Victor LaValle

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There are times when I need to dig up the diagram for a type of satellite dish, for instance, but I just can't seem to phrase this need correctly. As a result, I'm inundated by advertising for satellite television and people's online customer reviews of such services when, in fact, I was only trying to figure out what a certain component is called. — Victor LaValle

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The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden's 'Number of the Beast' album. — Victor LaValle

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The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare. — Victor LaValle

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Pepper woke up thinking of butts.
And nothing else.
Ladies' butts.
Skinny butts, big butts, saddlebag butts, flabby and firm butts, the kind that sit so high they seem like part of the woman's back, the kind that ride low and form a UU just above the thighs like in the old television commercials for Hanes Underalls, butts that wiggle and butts that jiggle, sagging butts and robust butts, butts that hardly make an impression under a pair of jeans; sidewinder butts and trumpet butts
the ones so meaty they actually spread out until they appear to be a woman's thighs (ass so fat you can see it from the front), butts as knotty as acorns, butts as smooth as a slice of Gouda, butts with pimples and butts with cellulite, the kind that have pockmarks or red splotches, butts with tattoos and butts with bullet scars. Butts you can cup in your warm hands. Butts and butts and butts.
In other words, Pepper woke up horny. — Victor LaValle

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Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up. Brick and mortar, elevated train tracks, and miles of underground pipe, this city lived; day and night it thrived. — Victor LaValle

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Before September 11, the skinny, jittery black guy made security think one thing: drug mule. But after the attacks, security only cared about bombs. So it was the Arab guys, the Puerto Ricans and Indians, even white men, that got searched. I was too dark to make people worry on a plane. Still caused fear in elevators. — Victor LaValle

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How many times did you shoot my father?" Tester asked. "I felt in danger for my life," Mr. Howard said. "I emptied my revolver. Then I reloaded and did it again. — Victor LaValle

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Here's the thing: I was charming. Well read and well spoken. Observant and even kind. In other words, I was kind of a catch. And I knew this was true. As long as you couldn't see me. If you saw me, you'd think I was the sea cow that had swallowed your catch. — Victor LaValle

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One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God ... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with ... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level. — Victor LaValle

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I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels. — Victor LaValle

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Nearly everyone could be undone by an old woman's displeasure. — Victor LaValle

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Going through all this nonsense to reach someone in charge, this was the first time she'd ever been treated like, well, a patient. With rules that defied all common logic; people employed to help you who are unable, really, to even hear you; the sense that the system's goal is only to keep trouble contained. It's — Victor LaValle

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'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh. — Victor LaValle

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And you can fool yourself if you're raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn't true. We're rubes too. — Victor LaValle

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Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives. — Victor LaValle

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Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently. — Victor LaValle

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People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift. — Victor LaValle

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I bear a hell within me," Black Tom growled. "And finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin. — Victor LaValle

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No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book. — Victor LaValle

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Don't focus on the mishaps; consider the pleasures instead. — Victor LaValle

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That's the funny thing," she said. "Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it's done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I'll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It's not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too. — Victor LaValle

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Taken together the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot though. — Victor LaValle

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Maybe nobody ever saw themselves completely objectively. Every self-image needs a flattering mirror or two. — Victor LaValle

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The shame wasn't in discovering that she had a price; everyone had one of those. Maybe it was just in learning, so concretely, that this was what she cost. — Victor LaValle

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I don't know what to say about the hygiene of the male species. — Victor LaValle

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His life had been disrupted, but not his billing cycles. — Victor LaValle

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Oppression doesn't make people noble. Give any of us a little comfort, and we'll kill to keep it. The despised become despicable. — Victor LaValle

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The success of any society must be judged by the life of its worst off. No other calculation will do. — Victor LaValle

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Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good. — Victor LaValle

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I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school. — Victor LaValle

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I'm always trying to make myself laugh. I'm the most enthusiastic audience I'm likely to find, so if it doesn't make me smile then it probably won't work on you. The jokes that only make me shrug get cut. — Victor LaValle

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Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic. — Victor LaValle

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Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men. — Victor LaValle

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When I finished graduate school, I had a master's of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book - and almost no marketable skills. — Victor LaValle

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She was in college, a time of optimistic fascism when it seems that all the world needs is one more rally. — Victor LaValle

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I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview. — Victor LaValle

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If you haven't caused a scene in a psych unit, it's just because you haven't been inside long enough. — Victor LaValle

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Queens, New York. The most ethnically diverse region not just in the United States, but on the entire planet ... In Queens, you will find Korean kids who sound like black kids. Italians who sound like Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans who sound like Italians. Third-generation Irish who sound like old Jews. That's Queens. Not a melting pot, not even a tossed salad, but an all-you-can-eat, mix-and-match buffet. — Victor LaValle

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Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name. — Victor LaValle

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To believe in only the practical, the rational, the realistic was a kind of glamour as well. But he couldn't enjoy the illusion of order anymore. Monsters aren't real until you meet one. — Victor LaValle

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The best writing deadlines are poverty and death. — Victor LaValle

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The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back. — Victor LaValle

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People who move to New York always the same mistake. They can't see the place. — Victor LaValle