Glen Duncan is a British author born in 1965 in Bolton, Lancashire, England to an Anglo-Indian family. He studied philosophy and literature at the universities of Lancaster and Exeter.
Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.
Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.
Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.
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.
If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
Every present anger derives from past weakness.
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.
One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.
Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.
With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kneecaps only exist to get hit with claw-hammers; grace only exists to be fallen from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.