Glen Duncan
Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.Collection: Attitude
Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.Collection: Heart
You love life because life's all there is.Collection: Love Life
There is no God and that's His only commandment.Collection: There Is No God
Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.Collection: Home
Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.Collection: Coffee
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.Collection: Hate
Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.Collection: Beautiful
I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.Collection: Should
What interests me is love, sex, death, cruelty, compassion and the desire for meaning in an apparently godless universe. In other words the human condition.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Past
Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.Collection: Beautiful
Every present anger derives from past weakness.Collection: Anger
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.Collection: Zenith
Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.Collection: Falling In Love
That's the problem with being alive ... You've got to keep thinking of what to do.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Life
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.)Collection: Two
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.Collection: Pain
The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.Collection: Grief
When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.Collection: Children
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.Collection: Life
Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.Collection: Pain
When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: Animal
I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Design
With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.Collection: World
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.Collection: Character
You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.Collection: Beauty
Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.Collection: Together
I'm in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.Collection: Perception
Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.Collection: Focus
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.Collection: Flower
Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Life
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]Collection: Discovery
We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.Collection: Worst
Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.Collection: Grace
Yes, Eden was beautiful- and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it- so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.)Collection: Beautiful
Time, you'll be pleased to know--and since one must start somewhere--was created in creation. The question What was there before creation? is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.Collection: Time
My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.Collection: Children
Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.Collection: Cities
You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because -- now do please be honest with yourself for once -- you'd have left, too.Collection: Mean
One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.Collection: One Day