Glen Duncan

“It’s why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn’t have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm too conceited for therapy.”

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

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

“You can't live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.”

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

“I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.”

“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.”

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

“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'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.”

“Don't bother looking for the meaning of it all. There isn't one.Maybe not, but life compulsively dangled the possibility. 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.”

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