Tony Burgess > Quotes

“They stay like this, in silence, both aware that they have created something together. Defiance. A pushing back of a darkness that no one has ever pushed at before. A wonderful, criminal liberty to love that which has been so viciously called unlovable.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“And now, no matter what I thought I had done or why I did it, it has become completely untrue because of what I have done since.”
― Tony Burgess, People Live Still in Cashtown Corners

“The thing he said aloud did not succeed.”
― Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything

“If I told you that everything about you had been just made up by someone, that all of your thoughts, all of your memories, even the things you chose to say had been invented and that they weren’t real, that you weren’t real, would you believe me? I don’t think so.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“It's strange to sleep. Sleep is a mysterious thing even in the simplest of people. When you're sleepy, you seem to be getting sick, losing energy, losing clear thought, lying down out of weakness. Then you succumb to the weakness and what happens next resembles death. And then you dream. You abide in a world whose rules are hidden even from you - you who create it.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“It’s my job really, to help you, my reader, in accepting things as real that aren’t. Most books try to get you to accept things that, at the very least, could be real – and that’s difficult enough, goodness knows – but here, in this book, nothing seems to be even trying to be real. Except, I would say, me. I’m here, I’m real. And to be honest, I’ve never been here before. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what I’m doing. In some ways, I’m afraid this is the most real story I’ve ever written.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“It’s amazing how quickly having someone telling you what you’re seeing replaces you actually seeing what you’re seeing.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“Maybe I went a bit too far, but that’s what people want now. There’s an expectation that children be treated poorly in their literature. Everyone wants to see children treated badly. So that … well, so that when they triumph over evil we all feel lifted up. It’s inspirational.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“Idaho is empty. He is an emptiness. Like the space you leave behind when you get out of a chair. It’s like after a loud noise, when all you hear is the sound of yourself listening. What is there is only was. That’s it. Idaho is was.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“There is a heavy price to pay for writing a bad book.”
― Tony Burgess, Idaho Winter: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

“In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn't quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me.”
― Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything

“There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into dipthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.”
― Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything

“perhaps, all these years, historians had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral because a spiral was so difficult to describe. was war, then, the big solution after all? war the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenalin, the solvent of ennui, angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? war itself a massive sexual act. -war, finally, the controller, the trimmer & excisor; the justifier of fertility?" --the Wanting Seed/Burgess”
― Tony Burgess

“An Underground that knew all about this, knew all about Les, was preparing to wake up the world and invite it to a Canada’s Wonderland made of bodies. Giant bloodslides. Houses of torture where children’s kidneys are twisted like sponges in the fat hands of musclemen. There would be buns crammed with the cooked knuckles of teenagers, and a king, sitting on a mountain of kings, eating his own shoulder.”
― Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything