Words matter. These are the best Victor LaValle Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
‘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.
It’s tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.
The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream – or a nightmare.
I know that many authors say editors don’t edit anymore, but that’s not been true in my experience.
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.
I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn’t gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.
I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.
You can’t write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’
In fiction, it’s a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.
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.
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.
Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.
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.
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.
I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don’t have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people.
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.
Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly.
People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.
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.
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.
‘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’d read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
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.
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.
