Dennis Nilsen > Quotes

“I did it all for me. Purely selfish. I worshiped the art and the act of
death, over and over. It’s as simple as that. Afterwards it was all
sexual confusion, symbolism, honoring the “fallen.” I was honoring
myself. I hated the decay and the dissection. There was no
sadistic pleasure in the killing. I killed them as I would like to be
killed myself, enjoying the extremity of the death act itself. If I did
it to myself I could only experience it once. If I did it to others, I
could experience the death act over and over again.
—Dennis Nilsen”
― Dennis Nilsen

“why he became one of Britain’s most infamous”
― Dennis Nilsen, History of a Drowning Boy: The Autobiography

“He may have been a paedophile but I didn’t remember him as threatening or oppressive.”
― Dennis Nilsen, History of a Drowning Boy: Inside the mind of a serial killer

“Dennis Nilsen himself noted that he would have quite liked to have kept certain parts of his victims not so much as trophies but as mementoes of the relationship he shared with that person.”
― Dennis Nilsen, History of a Drowning Boy: Inside the mind of a serial killer

“Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain….There was never a place for me in the scheme of things….I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark, endless dirges….I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid, unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime.”
― Dennis Nilsen