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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience. "

" Fear warps our understanding of reality and even our ability to see reality clearly. "

" 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

Life

My Life

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic. "

" 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

Feet

House

" One of the reasons I love devils so much is not based in my faith, but because as a kid, I grew up loving heavy metal and horror movies, and the devil is such a huge presence in both. "

" You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.' "

" 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. "

" 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

Devil

Beast

" It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Mind

Woman

" The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare. "

" I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "