Tony Burgess Quotes

• As a kid, I couldn't articulate it but I sought out things that could. At first it was horror films - extreme panic and terror, grotesque and maniacal. These films calmed me and made me feel more connected in my experiences.

  Tony Burgess

  Kids, Panic, Firsts

  Interview with Jonathan Ball, logger.believermag.com. August 31, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• I am a feral person. I have no bank account. I am unemployable. I own nothing. I lose my shoes sometimes when I go out. It sounds like I'm making a case for my own exceptionalism, which I suppose I am, but I wish it wasn't true.

  Tony Burgess

  Shoes, Wish, Sound

  4 Copy quote

• My fear, as a writer, is that I am a curiosity. That I can only bring you this peculiar condition from far away, from outside, and if you look at it then it will mean nothing. So, I have to pretend it's more than that. Horror writing lets me do that.

  Tony Burgess

  Writing, Mean, Curiosity

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• I am interested in giving the reader true vertigo. I look to deteriorating consciousness as our inevitable condition and I am trying to make it work the same way I did with my juvenile mind - that is, to imagine how we are suffering. To record it being actual and then virtual.

  Tony Burgess

  Giving, Mind, Suffering

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• I believe the book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life. But it has threatened your life. Not by saying something it believes is true, but by attacking it.

  Tony Burgess

  Believe, Book, Should

  Interview with Jonathan Ball, logger.believermag.com. August 31, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• A horror novel should reveal to you that you are falling apart. That there are ways your imagination can be made different. Can threaten what you think is. You should be holding onto that tree or rock screaming. Or laughing. Not at absurdity, either: absurdism is just a bourgeois and reactionary nostalgia for good, stable meaning.

  Tony Burgess

  Fall, Thinking, Rocks

  "The book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. August 31, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• I think horror should have occult elements, not as its subject but as its ambition. It is a machine that destroys illusion. I, of course, never achieve this, but I always act as if I can.

  Tony Burgess

  Ambition, Thinking, Should Have

  Interview with Jonathan Ball, logger.believermag.com. August 31, 2015.

  7 Copy quote

• The books are recordings; that's what they have to be, recordings of the writing. They have to be happening to me.

  Tony Burgess

  Book, Writing, Happenings

  "The book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. August 31, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

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