Novelists From The United States

"Faeries might have been wandering around in Victorian England. I can believe that. But it is a more difficult thing to think that they might be wandering around Camden Town now. It is more of a jump, but I find that more interesting in many ways. The irruption of the supernatural into our world is a much more enticing notion to explore than the same thing happening in some past time, or in a wholly imaginary world."

"So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything."

"I try to maintain a balance between having a vision of the world that many readers do not experience for themselves, trying to give them enough grounding in the world we are all familiar with, so they don't feel that they are completely lost in Faerie."

"I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot. So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift."

"I worked at the Smithsonian for a number of years. I had a very low-level job. I didn't have much responsibility, but I did have a Smithsonian ID badge that gave me access to all of the museums on the mall, and also the National Gallery of Art. In those days, you could go anywhere, which you can't do now. You could get in behind the scenes and wander along these tunnels. There is a scene in "Prince of Flowers" where the characters are in the Paleontology Department of the Museum of Natural History where they really do have this Raiders of the Lost Ark-type vast space filled with all of these unopened cartons. … I was really entranced with the idea of living in a museum. In Winterlong there are two parallel storylines and the one for Raphael takes place among this guild or tribe of curators who live in the ruins of the Smithsonian Institution."

"I'm sure one reason that so many Greek myths deal with terrifying, powerful women — Medea, Electra, the Erinyes, the Bacchae, — is that at some point in the misty past, women held a power that was terrifying — terrifying not because they were women whom men felt threatened by, but because they wielded that power in terrifying rituals that almost certainly involved human sacrifice. This would not be a popular platform on which to base a feminist agenda."

"A lot of the revisionist thinking by feminist mythologisers — people who based their projections of ancient "matristic" cultures on work done by folks like Marija Gimbutas — is based on archaeological and anthropological speculation that in some cases has since been proved wrong. The pretty happy flower children who lived at ancient Knossos, for instance, were the result of wishful thinking by the Victorian explorer Arthur Evans (a man, please note). No one actually knows what these cultures were really like, but it's doubtful that they were free of the same problems of sexual inequality that we have today."

"I'm an utterly orthodox feminist in the political or social sense: I want equal rights for women, period, and I vote that way. I support social programs that help women and children; I'm pro-choice, in favor of anything that makes it easier for women to raise their kids, with or without men, in conventional or unconventional family units. But do I think the world would be a better place if it were run solely by women? No; not any more than I think a solely patriarchal model is an ideal."

"I love the notion of there being a single group of Apollonian watchdogs down through the aeons, keeping the world safe from the malign (and far more fun-loving) forces of Dionysos."

"Mars Hill was inspired by a real place near where I live on the coast of Maine, a 100+ year old Spiritualist community called Temple Heights: little carpenter's gothic cottages tumbling down a hillside overlooking the sea, very picturesque and, tragically, very susceptible to the terrible development pressure that's bearing down on the small towns around here. So far, however, the spiritualists seem to be winning out. After I wrote "Last Summer at Mars Hill", I visited the place formally and had a reading done by a psychic there. The place was exactly as I'd imagined it, as were its (human) inhabitants. I saw no evidence of supernatural ones, alas."

"I've always had numinous dreams, and a lot of them feature a Dionysian character I named The Boy in the Tree. He first came to me when I was seventeen: I had a dream that I was on a flat featureless plane, mist everywhere. Then there was a blinding flash of lightning, deafening thunder, and I fell to the ground. Someone reached out to touch the middle of my forehead with a finger: I opened my eyes, the mist was gone, and there he was: the boy in the tree, this beautiful demonic figure with mocking green eyes. After that he would appear in dreams, sitting up in a tree and talking to me, and I'd have this incredible wave of emotion, a feeling I've only ever had in dreams — the most amazingly intense combination of desire and loss and anticipation. Later I'd think (still dreaming) This is what I will feel when I die. And who knows? Maybe I will. Then, while researching Winterlong, I found a reference to Dionysios of Boeotia, where the god was called the One in the Tree. So even though I rationally know there's no such thing as a Dionsyian god, or a universal unconscious, it's very, very easy for me to extrapolate them both from my own dream-experience. The roots of these myths of the dying or vegetative god are so ancient and so many that one can wander among them forever, I think, yet never find a single source. And the primary material in Greece is so fascinating and so dark — The Bacchae, what we know of the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries — great stuff for writers. For me personally, of course, Dionysos embodies all the themes that have always preoccupied me: mutable sexual identity, altered states of consciousness; madness, the theater, ecstacy."

"I think Washington is a magical place. I lived there for thirteen years, and until the day I left I never wanted to live anywhere else. I went back for the first time two years ago, after over a decade's absence; it was like seeing an old lover and discovering — with great relief — that the flame is still there. Gore Vidal famously remarked of walking through the city with his grandfather, a senator, and the old man telling him, "Someday all this will make marvelous ruins.""

"I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me — especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them — I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible."

"I have to say (regretfully) that I've seen very little in my real life to indicate the presence of either the supernatural or the divine. As for apocalypse, I was imprinted at an early age with the idea of The End of the World (this also courtesy of the Catholic Church). I can remember being terrified of thunderstorms — I'd think, Uh oh, THIS IS IT. I was born in 1957, and grew up in the metropolitan New York area with the Cold War as a backdrop. In kindergarten and first and second grade we had constant air raid drills, sirens going off and that whole "Duck 'n Cover" drill when you cower under your desk or else hide in the classroom cloak closet, waiting for the Atomic Bomb to drop. I had nightmares about that well into my twenties. For a while in the 1970s I lived near a fire station in D.C., and when the fire sirens would go off at night I'd wake up terrified — again — that THIS WAS IT. Of course it never was, but it was good practice at being scared and thinking about scary stuff."

"What a crazy place this was. Someone gets sick, and instead of dialing 911 you send for an obese old fortune-teller. The thought made her stomach churn; because of course that’s what her mother had done. Put her faith in fairy dust and crystals instead of physicians and chemo."

"Jason just couldn’t take it. Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest."

"“Self-assured?” “I guess. Self-assured and smug, you know? Why is it teenagers are always so fucking smug?” “Because they share a great secret,” Martin said mildly, and took another bite of sprouts. “Oh yeah? What’s that?” “Their parents are all assholes.”"

"I'm a very neat monster."

"For the first time I could remember, I felt weak, woozy and stupid— like a human-being. Like a very small and helpless human-being."

"I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling."

"And what did you do last night, Dexter? Oh, I played with my dolls while a friend chopped up my sister."

"The mind picks some very bad times to take a walk doesn't it?"

"Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?"

"It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being. Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO. The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile. What a scamp."

"Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?"

"I did not like this feeling of having feelings."

"But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation."

"Life's only obligation, afterall, was to be interesting."

"And here I always thought morality was useless"

"Really now: If you can't get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?"

"Another beautiful Miami day. Mutilated corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. I got dressed and went to work."

"Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder i had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense."

"Why do so many people start their messages with, "It's me"? Of course it is you. We all know that. But who the hell ARE you?"

"After a long moment I closed the freezer door. I wanted to lie down and press my cheek against the cool linoleum. Instead I reached out with my little finger and flipped the Barbie's head. It went thack thack against the door. I flipped it again. Thack thack. Whee. I had a new hobby."

"I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities."

"Perhaps because I'll never be one, humans are interesting to me."

"It’s like, everything really is two ways, the way we all pretend it is and the way it really is"

"I enjoyed watching good-looking idiots looking at each other. A great spectator sport."

"Did I say imaginary? Well yes. Human men are not like that."

"I am unlovable...I have tried to involve myself in other people, in relationships, and even - in my sillier moments - in love. But it doesn't work. Something in me is broken or missing and sooner or later the other person catches me Acting or one of Those Nights comes along."

"I poked at the white paper bag. There was nothing left inside. Just like me: a clean crisp outside and nothing at all on the inside."

"I think people understand things different when they get older. It’s not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I’m just understanding things different. Better."

"Me, feeling. What a concept."

"Incompetence is rewarded more often than not."

"Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them."

"I had killed our careful relationship by driving my tongue through its heart and pushing it off a cliff."

"Every major city has a section like this one. If a piebald dwarf with advanced leprosy wants to have sex with a kangaroo and a teenage choir, he'll find his way here and get a room. When he's done he might take the whole gang next door for a cup of Cuban coffee and a medianioche sandwich. Nobody would care, as long as he tipped."

"Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm quite sure most people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake it all. I fake it very well, and the feelings are never there."

"Killing makes me feel good."

""I'll sue you and the Sheriff's Department," he said, sounding more sulky than anything else. "Questioning me like a common criminal! And with an FBI agent standing over me in a threatening manner!" Since Bishop was across the room leaning rather negligently against the filing cabinet, that was such an obvious exaggeration that Miranda could only admire it for a moment in silence."