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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Glen Duncan Quotes

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

– Glen Duncan

If being a werewolf is really a curse, you’ve got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it.

– Glen Duncan

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

– Glen Duncan

I used to believe in signs, omens, patterns, secret purpose, synchronicities.

– Glen Duncan

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.

– Glen Duncan

I don’t think things happen for a reason, but I think it’s perfectly possible to experience life meaningfully.

– Glen Duncan

I will waste an extraordinary amount of time, you know. And if it’s not watching television, I’ll be sitting staring out of the window. And yes, I know there’s the idea of the artist, sitting there doing nothing while things are going on, but actually, no. It’s vacant space. I’m thinking about the laundry.

– Glen Duncan

There are, I’m depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt.

– Glen Duncan

In a fit of pique, I said to my agent, ‘I’m going to write something you can sell.’ The idea was to write a straight page-turner, with no literary conceits.

– Glen Duncan

While I was writing ‘The Last Werewolf,’ I didn’t watch any horror movies.

– Glen Duncan

I’m not quite sure when I began to be troubled by the creeping sense of my own ludicrousness, but it persisted – and eventually grew into a fascination. I started writing about it. Thus, in His characteristically mysterious way, the Lord made clear His plans for me.

– Glen Duncan

We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.

– Glen Duncan

I’m too conceited for therapy.

– Glen Duncan

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don’t belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.

– Glen Duncan

What I’ve absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films.

– Glen Duncan

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

– Glen Duncan

Everyone is obsessed with air fresheners. We associate smell with disgust. But we’re all locked into the body; we can’t escape it.

– Glen Duncan

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

– Glen Duncan

I read John Irving’s novel ‘The World According To Garp’ when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.

– Glen Duncan

There are two ways to write a werewolf novel – you can examine the genre conventions, or you can say, ‘What would it be like if I were a werewolf?’

– Glen Duncan

We have all seen werewolf transformations hundreds of times on screen.

– Glen Duncan

Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can’t reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation.

– Glen Duncan

Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They’re all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.

– Glen Duncan

I still want magic, I find. The old fashioned kind. I don’t believe in it, but I still have a hankering for it.

– Glen Duncan

One of the things that seems absolutely clear to me about werewolves – with their canine makeup – is that they would be dogs, as it were.

– Glen Duncan

I’m constantly dogged with a feeling of fraudulence, so if somebody tells me they like what I’ve written, then I immediately begin to think it’s rubbish.

– Glen Duncan