Literary Birthday – 9 July – Thomas Ligotti

Happy Birthday, Thomas Ligotti, born 9 July 1953.

Thomas Ligotti Quotes

1. To my mind, a well-developed sense of humour is the surest indication of a person’s humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humour may be.
2. I’m completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.
3. Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.
4. We live in a permanent state of bad faith, a mutual representation of ourselves to one another for the sake of remaining sane and following our biological imperative to continue as a species.
5. When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I immediately knew that I wanted to write horror stories.

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. He writes in different modes of speculative fiction, including the sub-genre weird fiction, which has been ‘described as philosophical horror, written in the tradition of gothic fiction.’ (via) His books include Teatro Grottesco, Noctuary, The Nightmare Factory, and The Spectral Link.

by Amanda Patterson

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