Brent Weeks
Author
1977-03-07
Quotes by Brent Weeks
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...Many shadows hide behind light, and the best lies are those seasoned liberally with truth: salt covering the flavor of rotten meat.
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This world has only two kinds of people: villains and smiling villains.
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I'm afraid we were so eager to avoid war, we've made it all but certain.
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Words were another sword for the man who wielded them well.
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Assassination is an art, milord. And I am the city's most accomplished artist.
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Moments of beauty sustain us through hours of ugliness.
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Why is it, my shadow-striding friend, that we don't fear dreams? We lose consciousness, lose control, things happen with no apparent logic and abiding by no apparent rules.... We don't fear dreams, but we do fear madness, and death terrifies us.
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I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say... *shakes head* Nah, I just can't do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I do think, Can't touch this. And when I'm worried I'm overwriting a scene, I think, Hammer, don't hurt 'em.
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Hope is the great deceiver. Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.
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The perfect killer has no identity.
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The perfect killer has no conscience.
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The perfect killer has no friends. Only targets.
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The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I'll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction— until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define —literature—. The Latin root simply means —letters—. Those letters are either delivered— they connect with an audience— or they don't. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that's because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books— and thus what they count as literature— really tells you more about them than it does about the book.
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Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.
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I'm not dreaming this, am I? he asked.Dehvi lifted an eyebrow. There's only one way to know for sure, he said.What's that?Go piss in the woods. If you feel wet and warm afterward, wake up.
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Words were another sword for the man who wielded them well.
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...Many shadows hide behind light, and the best lies are those seasoned liberally with truth: salt covering the flavor of rotten meat.
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The perfect killer has no friends. Only targets.
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The perfect killer has no conscience.
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I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say... *shakes head* Nah, I just can't do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I do think, Can't touch this. And when I'm worried I'm overwriting a scene, I think, Hammer, don't hurt 'em.
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