Top 30 Glen Duncan Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I’m too conceited for therapy.

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.

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 am a man of lost faiths.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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?’

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.

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