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" Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women. "
Victor LaValle
Story
Women
Fear
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" You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.' "
Victor LaValle
Story
Mental
You
" I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience. "
Victor LaValle
Experience
Been
True
" Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic. "
Victor LaValle
Try
Writing
Catholic
" For as long as I could remember, the person in E23 pasted the same Halloween decoration, a witch with a giant wart on her crone's nose, but whenever kids rang, the tenant wouldn't answer. At first, kids figured they'd just missed the guy: bad timing. But it seemed impossible that all of us missed him every year. "
Victor LaValle
Long
Halloween
Remember
" Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. "
Victor LaValle
Schizophrenia
Family
Mental Illness
" The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare. "
Victor LaValle
Our
Best
Dream
" I like America, where believers eddy around each other like currents of air. Even our atheists are devout! To be an American is to be a believer. I don't have much faith in institutions, but I still believe in people. "
Victor LaValle
People
Air
America
" Clothes are a kind of uniform. A nun's habit, a surgeon's scrubs, a cop's uniform. People often say that when they put on a certain uniform, they actually think of themselves differently. "
Victor LaValle
Uniform
Clothes
Habit
" I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there. "
Victor LaValle
World
People
Survive
" I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York. "
Victor LaValle
Me
Life
My Life
" Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you're doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh. "
Victor LaValle
Laugh
Know
Fun
" What's beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it's in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they're affected by it. "
Victor LaValle
Way
Beautiful
Japan
" I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier. "
Victor LaValle
Pretty
Bad
University
" Lumpy and lazy; I aspired to lethargy. In the second year of university, I missed half my classes just because I couldn't pull myself out of bed. "
Victor LaValle
Just Because
Missed
Lazy
" It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy. "
Victor LaValle
Look
Write
Ugly
" I weighed 25 stone, and I didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as an estate. "
Victor LaValle
Me
Feet
House
" Here's the thing: I was charming. Well read and well spoken. Observant and even kind. In other words, I was kind of a catch. And I knew this was true. As long as you couldn't see me. If you saw me, you'd think I was the sea cow that had swallowed your catch. "
Victor LaValle
Words
Think
Sea
" 'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting. "
Victor LaValle
Devil
Best
Glory
" Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building. "
Victor LaValle
Over
Building
Earth
" I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October. "
Victor LaValle
Voice
Deep
Black
" Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly. "
Victor LaValle
Even
Fear
Reality
" I couldn't get a date, but I couldn't be quite sure how unattractive I'd become. I was still friendly; I made jokes, and in my mind, if I saw a woman smiling at me... I still had a chance. I did not. "
Victor LaValle
Me
Mind
Woman
" The profession is never going back to those days when a handful of wealthy people treated publishing like a hobby: one where the business can lose money because the family has lots of it to burn. Frankly, I don't think that model was ever sustainable, and it really only enriched a small number of writers. "
Victor LaValle
People
Think
Money
" The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden's 'Number of the Beast' album. "
Victor LaValle
Me
Devil
Beast