Victor LaValle Quotes

There’s the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions.

On June 23, 1864, Ambrose Bierce was in command of a skirmish line of Union soldiers at Kennesaw Mountain in northern Georgia. He’d been a soldier for three years and, in that time, had been commended by his superiors for his efficiency and bravery during battle.

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.

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.

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.

The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden’s ‘Number of the Beast’ album.

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.

When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don’t, it’s a distraction.

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.

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

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.

‘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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.

Social media give me the privilege of learning about more people than I could meet in my whole life. Taken together, the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot, though.

What’s beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it’s in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they’re affected by it.

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

It’s tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.

Every era needs a genre through which it understands itself.

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.

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.

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.

My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.

Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon ‘our’ vulnerable women.