Top 106 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

Until the age of thirteen, I tortured the waiting worlds of book illustration and professional football by shilly-shallying over which of them was going to get the benefit of my inestimable talents.

What I've absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films.

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

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

One of the things that seems absolutely clear to me about werewolves - with their canine makeup - is that they would be dogs, as it were.

My family is Anglo-Indian, and of the four children, I'm the only one who wasn't born in India.

My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.

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

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

My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.

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.

I'm not quite sure when I began to be troubled by the creeping sense of my own ludicrousness, but it persisted - and eventually grew into a fascination. I started writing about it. Thus, in His characteristically mysterious way, the Lord made clear His plans for me.

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

I will waste an extraordinary amount of time, you know. And if it's not watching television, I'll be sitting staring out of the window. And yes, I know there's the idea of the artist, sitting there doing nothing while things are going on, but actually, no. It's vacant space. I'm thinking about the laundry.

In a fit of pique, I said to my agent, 'I'm going to write something you can sell.' The idea was to write a straight page-turner, with no literary conceits.

I'm too conceited for therapy.

I don't think things happen for a reason, but I think it's perfectly possible to experience life meaningfully.

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.

I find the ideas of Catholicism incredibly rich and inspiring. Bogus, unfortunately, but nonetheless inspiring. I think they always provide an interesting nexus through which to look at the way we are.

There are two ways to write a werewolf novel - you can examine the genre conventions, or you can say, 'What would it be like if I were a werewolf?'

Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.

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.

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.

I am a man of lost faiths.

We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.

We have all seen werewolf transformations hundreds of times on screen.

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.

Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation.

The winter of 1991 found me stunned and shivering in the aftermath of an imploded love affair. Being 26, I flung myself actorishly on London and, without any intimations of my own ludicrousness, spent two years showing God what I thought of Him by letting myself go.

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.

If being a werewolf is really a curse, you've got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it.

Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.

We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.

While I was writing 'The Last Werewolf,' I didn't watch any horror movies.

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

When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.

The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.

Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on 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.

Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.

Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.

The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.

Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.

Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.

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.)

That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.

I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.

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.

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.

You love life because life's all there is.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

There is no God and that's His only commandment.

That's the problem with being alive ... You've got to keep thinking of what to do.