"The bore is the human cuckoo. He will take over anything, usurp any nest. His one outstanding feature is that he has no features. He has nothing whatever to offer society, not the least germ of an original or positive idea – and yet the rest of us somehow find ourselves moving up to make room for him, just as the body makes itself host to a destructive virus. Bores would take the entire world over if they could; sometimes they do. Here is an extract from the diary of one who did: I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess… (Heinrich Himmler, November 1921)."
Robert William Arthur Cook, better known since the 1980s by his pen name Derek Raymond, was an English crime writer, credited with being a founder of British noir.
"Then we sat in silence, watching the scenery whirring past us in the improving light. I was lighting us both a cigarette when he turned to me and said: Sorry if I got cross, morrie. Thats all right, I said. Bit on edge, I suppose. It was all very kosher and British. Not surprising, I said. Its been an angstful sort of night."
"By the word existence I mean the one contract valid for mankind; I define it as the general contract. In it are the clauses of human life; its uses, responsibilities, limitations, its inevitable eclipse. This contract is the basis of the black novel, whose loathing of violence, which it describes as precisely as possible in order to remind people how disgusting it is, causes it to rise up against death forced on any person before his time, and that is where it becomes a novel in mourning. Each contract is to be terminated in the way that its clauses are set out; but it is not to be destroyed by any contract-holder. That possibility is contained in no contract. To break his contract is either to invite the breakers destruction, or else it is evidence that the act of destruction has been carried out by a signatory who has already been destroyed, such as a killer — and that is why my detective picks up Suarez battered head and kisses it. I will go further. What is remarkable about I Was Dora Suarez has nothing to do with literature at all; what is remarkable about it is that in its own way and by its own route it struggles after the same message as Christ. I am not the kind of person that anyone would expect to say such a thing, for although I believe firmly in the invisible, I am not religious. But in writing the book I definitely underwent an experience that I can only describe as cathartic; the writing of Suarez, though plunging me into evil, became the cause of my seeking to purge what was evil in myself. It was only after I had finished the book that I realised this; I was far too deeply involved in the battle with evil that the book became to think any further than that at the time [...] Suarez was my atonement for fifty years indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others."
"Existence is sometimes what a forward artillery observer sees of enemy lines through field glasses. A distant and troubling view brought suddenly into focus with a wealth of obscene detail."
"The black novel seeks to present as forcibly as it can the terminal psychic situation that occurs in people who have arrived at a point where they have no hope, no motive, and no longer even the desire to conceal anything from themselves; the black novel intervenes at the moment where a human being approaches his last moment: The first night of death must seem so strange. A special mood is necessary to make language plastic enough to convey such experience exactly; experience so devastatingly simple that, like love, it verges on the indescribable. Nearly every attempt to convey it can really only be described as another in a seemingly endless series of attempts since we cannot describe what we are not yet in a position to know — and yet it is the black novels absolute duty to express it. T. S. Eliot, I think, got closest to describing the nature of this challenge when he wrote (I paraphrase): It is not necessary to die to describe death."
"Nothing else much matters once you have achieved the hardest thing, which is to act out of conviction. Even if you have been beaten by evil, in the bitterness of defeat the battle has left a trace for the others, and you can go feeling clean. I recognise that I am a minor writer; but this does not affect the depth of my convictions."