Poppy Z. Brite Quotes

In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny - an experience I've never had in America!

New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.

You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

I can't heal your pain but I can see it. And you don't have to be lost. Not forever.

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.

Never relinquish your terrors. That's when they catch you.

Ive tried to avoid labels, but they always find you.

My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.

Mostly I enjoy the restaurants (my husband is a chef), though I wish we had a wider diversity of ethnic food.

Delete nothing. Move nothing. Change nothing. Learn everything.

My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.

I like visiting peoples homes on Saint Josephs Day, when people set up altars, serve food as a tribute to the saint, and invite the public - I enjoy that much more than Mardi Gras.

I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.

My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove.

Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.

Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.

I believe in whatever gets you throught the night. [...] Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four A.M.knows all my secrets.

If you want something, you don't wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.

When you have too much faith in something, it's bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.

With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood.

If you’re ever lucky enough to belong somewhere, if a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are things more valuable than life.

I'm your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you've become one?

Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.

And I can't think of a reason I'd ever use a pseudonym, as I wouldn't want to publish something that I didn't like enough to put my name on it.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.

If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.

Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.

Celebrities, even insignificant ones like me, are created to be abused by the Great Unwashed.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I've certainly learned a great deal from my husband, though, and could never have written a book like Liquor without him and the people he introduces me to and the stories he brings home.

And what was I if not death's ghostwriter?

Ah, relationships. If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one.

But if I die without trying again, I'm a coward. I don't mind having regrets about stuff I've done. It's the regrets about stuff I haven't done that bother me.