Cameron Trost > Cameron's Quotes

“Whenever there’s a riot, that’s how it starts. It grips us to see the foremost god of the modern world crushed by prehistoric might. The burning car is the single most poignant representation of the post-industrial psyche.”
― Cameron Trost, Flicker

“By running a couple of red lights and overtaking cars in the oncoming traffic lane, Declan was able to make it to the Gooding Drive roundabout in record time. He knew for a fact there was no surer way of getting a girl in the mood for hanky-panky than proving one’s manliness through motoring prowess.”
― Cameron Trost, The Animal Inside: A Collection of Strange Tales

“Even if I had convict ancestry, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. As far as I’m concerned, the real criminals back in those days weren’t twelve-year-old boys nicking a loaf of bread or a pair of socks to ward off hunger and blisters. No, it was those who exploited them; keeping the battler in the gutter while they sat around in their manors, sipping tea and admiring portraits of their toffee-nosed great grandfathers.”
― Cameron Trost, Hoffman's Creeper and Other Disturbing Tales

“- I don’t know what else to say.
- There is nothing else to say. A few minutes of words can’t change years of absurdity.”
― Cameron Trost, Hoffman's Creeper and Other Disturbing Tales

“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”
― Iain Banks

“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.”
― Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background

“Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot”
― Iain M. Banks

“Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse …”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“I write because I have stories to tell that have never been told before. I want to share these stories with you. I want to keep you up at night. I want to take you by the hand and lead you into the tunnels. Then I'll let go, because I want you to lose yourself for a while.”
― Cameron Trost

“Writing sober might not be a barrel of laughs, but writing drunk is a whisky business.”
― Cameron Trost

“The short story is where the writer bares all. There's no room for padding or glossing over. This is where imperfections are exposed and strengths are on display.”
― Cameron Trost

“Other writers aren't your enemies. Your greatest opponent is the version of your self that holds the other version back. Unleash the best version of you!”
― Cameron Trost

“I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.”
― David Bowie

“I am not interested in being original. I am interested in being true.”
― Agostinho da Silva

“Civilization is the name we give to the interaction of human beings in a very creative way, when, as it were, a critical mass of cultural potential and a certain surplus of resources have been built up.”
― J M Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertianties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
― Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“The lime lorry was waiting, its voracious motor rumbling, while bright spotlights scanned the houses on either side of the street. On the side of the vehicle, those meaningless words printed in dark green. Was it the name of a revolutionary new company, or that of the end of it all—the apocalypse?”
― Cameron Trost, Murder and Machinery

“It was only the second time they had made love at her place. Andrew had identified the hibiscus flower in her mystery box and requested the site of their lovemaking. Ever since she’d told him about her father’s reptile room, he’d wanted to do her there. He’d imagined that fornicating in the middle of a room walled with vivariums full of lizards and snakes with phallic bodies and flickering tongues would be highly arousing,”
― Cameron Trost, The Animal Inside: A Collection of Strange Tales

“The case of the Stayne fortune had been challenging
and nerve-wracking, but also financially rewarding. At present, the investigator of strange occurrences found himself in the unusual position of not having to worry about paying the rent on time and being able to stock their home with such basic necessities as a bottle of decent whisky.”
― Cameron Trost, Oscar Tremont, Investigator of the Strange and Inexplicable

“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Maybe we’re not doing this stupid fucking dinner and I can hang out with my friends tonight instead of this parental version of waterboarding.”
― Nyla K., For the Fans

“Unicorndicks: God, I would beg you to ruin my life and thank you for it after.”
― Nyla K., For the Fans

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book