Les Edgerton > Quotes

“If life hands you lemons... make lemonade. Then... try to find someone to whom life has handed vodka...”
― Les Edgerton

“What is reasonable for you to expect is that no matter how idiosyncratic or “different” your own, particular voice may be, there will be a number of readers who will like it. Who will be drawn to the personality on the page.”
― Les Edgerton, Finding Your Voice: How to Put Personality in Your Writing

“By being yourself on the page, you'll more than likely attract more readers because of your individuality than you would by hiding your personality behind a neutral style.”
― Les Edgerton, Finding Your Voice: How to Put Personality in Your Writing

“Wissen Sie, weshalb man zwischen uns Verurteilten eine Zelle unbelegt lässt? Damit wir kein Komplott schmieden, uns selbst abzumurksen. Das würde gegen das Gesetz verstoßen [...]. Ein sehr schwerwiegender Verstoß, allerdings! In diesem Fürstentum wird es als niederträchtige Handlungsweise erachtet, den Versuch zu unternehmen, das Exekutionskommando auszutricksen.”
― Les Edgerton, The Rapist

“Each scene in a story is a battle, and the story entire is a war.”
― Les Edgerton, Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go

“Come on, big boy,” she said. “I guess it don’t matter what it cost since you didn’t ask, but that forty, that’s for head. You want to put it in, that’s forty more.”
― Les Edgerton, The Perfect Crime

“It would be nice to say that artistic concerns are what create innovations, but often as not, it's the CPAs of the world who initiate progress.”
― Les Edgerton, Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go

“He was slowwalking somebody for a carton of butts and the guy came by and threw acid in his face. He lay in his cell and screamed all night. The hack downstairs just kept on reading his magazine. .... In the morning, after we went out for chow they came and got Melrose who was down to a little occasional whimper by then. None of us heard anything we said, when they asked. When Melrose got out of the hospital, he had pink blotches all over his face, looked like bubble gum. Permanent blotches. Also, he lost an eye.”
― Les Edgerton, Just Like That

“For that matter, rape itself is instrumental in propagating the species in that many of these so-called perverse acts result in pregnancy. The rapist should be applauded, not reviled”
― Les Edgerton, The Rapist

“He knew what was going to happen next. He’d answer her silly-ass question, take her drunken ass out on the dance floor, and an hour later they’d be doing the horizontal cha-cha. Not bad work if you could get it though, he thought...
“How’d I lose my eye?”
― Les Edgerton, The Perfect Crime

“Let me tell you who occupies this prison cell. Perfidious, his name is Perfidity. His name is Liar, Blasphemer, Defiler of Truth, Black-Tongued. He lies down with all members of the congregation equally, tells them each in turn they are his beloved, while he is already attending to the next assignation in his relentless rendezvous with the consumption of souls.
He will inhale you, devour you, eat the pulp of your soul and spit out the husk. Behind his eyes lies nothing save the fevered light of unholy candles. He is black magic without redemption, without even the nethermost quality that could be termed human, or rather, he is not that at all; he is all that is estimated human, the sum total of those values that achieve the color that is the presence of all colors: black. He lacks a center—each of you is his center—and he has sucked the marrow dry of each of those he has visited. Beware of the son of Moloch that paces to and fro in that barred room.
This unholy creature is none other than the author of this narrative, Truman Ferris Pinter”
― Les Edgerton, The Rapist