Victor LaValle

“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.”

“Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself.”

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

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

“People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.”

“Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.”

“'Dark Gods,' T. E. D. Klein's book of four novellas, felt like a godsend - even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks.”

“One of the reasons I love devils so much is not based in my faith, but because as a kid, I grew up loving heavy metal and horror movies, and the devil is such a huge presence in both.”

“The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.”

“If you want to learn the true nature of a child you have to watch how she plays. If you want to learn the true nature of an adult you have to watch how she does her job.”

“Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.”

“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.”

“No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.”

“Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'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.”

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

“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.”