All vampires smoke. Smoking’s high on the list of Things You Take Up To Pass The Time.

Live long enough and nothing is news. ‘The News’ is ‘the new things.’ That’s fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that...

The Curse has a thing for contrast: frivolity one minute, homicide the next.

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

You took a life and the theft went unpunished. God didn’t strike you down. The sky didn’t fall. The morning after, you turned on the faucet and water still came out… It was still good...

… all his strength gathered in his hips and chest and his arms wrapped around me and his breath jabbed soft and hot in my ear and a note of tenderness was there at the...

I’ve always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It’s hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever if felt...

Big. Hot. Yellow-white. The sky’s blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone’s hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged...

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...

By all means, become an abomination–but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

It rewrites the contract, I’d read somewhere. Your self’s no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.

Nothing is the whole story. The self’s curse – and the writer’s.

Whatever doesn’t kill them, makes them make reality TV shows…

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

Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There’s a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the...

The lies you tell yourself. The necessary lies.

Hell […] is the absence of God and the presence of Time.

I didn’t cry. Real things don’t make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I’m like most civilised humans.

Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to?

Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.

I read somewhere that when you’re a kid it’s people’s cruelty that makes you cry, then when you’re an adult it’s their kindness.

It’s why we close the eyes, too. The dead shouldn’t have to look on the lewd aliveness of the living.

Comedy, of course, lives for serious moments.

All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its…motivation.

but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the...

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.

The question ‘What was there before creation?’ is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.

There’s always someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

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...

Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels’ recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche’s ghostly script?

It wasn’t love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. `Glockenspiel,’ Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he’d...

The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

If you had a lot of money and you were miserable, you’d be miserable poor.

You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn’t. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you’ll find it a room.

… vampire ruler Hin Kahur implemented howler aversion therapy.

Human love didn’t eradicate God, but it put Him into His proper distant second place.

Full moon rises. You change. You need what you need, so you do what you do. The kill – like the show – must go on.

The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it.

It’s Big Brother with werewolves. Live coverage for a month, leading up to a group kill on full moon.

You can’t live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.

But wulf did what it does: Simply insisted. Simply burned through. Simply defied. The same shrugging, grinning continuance. The nature of life. The nature of the beast.

You love life because life’s all there is.