Best 85 quotes of Glen Duncan on MyQuotes

Any seasoned deal maker will tell you that spontaneous negotiation's a bad strategy; the ad hoc approach will leave you ripped-off, busted, conned, stiffed, outsmarted and generally holding the shitty end of the stick.

Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you're not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the come-down, never the zenith.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

Every now and then life sold you an illusion of design. A coincidence, a parallel, a sledgehammer symbol. The goods were always faulty. You forked over the cash only to discover they'd fallen apart by the time you got home. But life kept at it. Life couldn't help it. Life was a compulsive salesman.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.

For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do... [Lucifer]

Grace only exists to be fallen from.

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.

I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it.

I don't remember the first image of a werewolf I saw, but I suspect it was the hybrid type, up on two legs, with long limbs, hair, claw-like fingernails and lupine head. To me there's nothing scary about complete transformation from human into wolf. Wolves aren't scary. They're dangerous, yes, but so are geese, in the wrong mood. What's scary is seeing the human in the wolf but knowing it's beyond the reach of reason or emotional appeal. That's where the horror and dread kicks in.

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I'm not sure I ever really liked him.' Adam?' I said. 'I don't blame you.' 'Not Adam,' she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. 'God.

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.

I'm in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.

I'm too conceited for therapy.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.

Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.

Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.

Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.

Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.

Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.

Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God--then having it taken away, forever.

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

Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.

No artist knows everything... but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.

Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.

Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.

One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying.

One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.

Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.

Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.

Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.

Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.

Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.

That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)

The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.

The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?

There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.

This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains.

We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.