Top 100 Victor Lavalle Quotes
#1. I have my teachers who tell me what to do. I'm not quite old enough yet to be truly independent.
Victor LaValle
#2. Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.
Victor LaValle
#3. The journalistic endeavor - at least theoretically - is grounded in objectivity. The goal is to get you to understand what happened, when and to whom.
Victor LaValle
#4. Don't focus on the mishaps; consider the pleasures instead.
Victor LaValle
#6. Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys.
Victor LaValle
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction.
Victor LaValle
#10. 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
#11. My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
Victor LaValle
#12. 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.
Victor LaValle
#13. His life had been disrupted, but not his billing cycles.
Victor LaValle
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. People who move to New York always the same mistake. They can't see the place.
Victor LaValle
#17. Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need. They
Victor LaValle
#18. 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
#19. I couldn't get a date, but I couldn't be quite sure how unattractive I'd become. I was still friendly; I made jokes, and in my mind, if I saw a woman smiling at me ... I still had a chance. I did not.
Victor LaValle
#20. 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
#21. Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant--these were useful tricks for a black man in a white neighborhood. Survival techniques.
Victor LaValle
#22. I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
Victor LaValle
#23. Nearly everyone could be undone by an old woman's displeasure.
Victor LaValle
#24. Education is gathering information and reading ... No human being can thrive without some form of education. How you get it is up to you - the important thing is that you get it.
Victor LaValle
#25. Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.
Victor LaValle
#26. 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
#27. One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
Victor LaValle
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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.
Victor LaValle
#31. I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.
Victor LaValle
#32. The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.
Victor LaValle
#33. In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey.
Victor LaValle
#34. Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives.
Victor LaValle
#35. The success of any society must be judged by the life of its worst off. No other calculation will do.
Victor LaValle
#36. 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
#37. I don't know what to say about the hygiene of the male species.
Victor LaValle
#38. 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
#39. If you haven't caused a scene in a psych unit, it's just because you haven't been inside long enough.
Victor LaValle
#40. Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.
Victor LaValle
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Time alone is pornography for people with families.
Victor LaValle
#44. That most natural human appetite, the hunger for somewhere else.
Victor LaValle
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. Fuck the meek. The despised will inherit the earth!
Victor LaValle
#49. 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.
Victor LaValle
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing.
Victor LaValle
#55. This wasn't about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen.
Victor LaValle
#56. 'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.
Victor LaValle
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.
Victor LaValle
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Victor LaValle
#65. No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.
Victor LaValle
#66. Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.
Victor LaValle
#68. 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
#69. Maybe nobody ever saw themselves completely objectively. Every self-image needs a flattering mirror or two.
Victor LaValle
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Her professionalism aside, Nabisase's victory was rigged by an endomorph and a goblin standing in crabgrass, and she would never know it. There are so many lives decided this way.
Victor LaValle
#75. 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
#76. He had, in fact, expected to be paid to play for one evening because that's exactly what the man promised three days earlier. But a wealthy man's reality is remade at will.
Victor LaValle
#77. She was in college, a time of optimistic fascism when it seems that all the world needs is one more rally.
Victor LaValle
#78. 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
#80. Stupid people had a few authors in common: Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel. What nonsense. Such dreck.
Victor LaValle
#81. 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
#82. Destroy if all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn't make messes; mankind was the mess.
Victor LaValle
#83. 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
#84. 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.
Victor LaValle
#85. 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
#86. The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare.
Victor LaValle
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.
Victor LaValle
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.
Victor LaValle
#93. 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
#94. Taken together the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot though.
Victor LaValle
#95. 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.
Victor LaValle
#96. 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
#97. '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
#98. In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
Victor LaValle
#99. 'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.
Victor LaValle
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