Literary Horror Birthday – 9 July – Thomas Ligotti

Happy Birthday, Thomas Ligotti, born 9 July 1953.

Five 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. His books include Teatro Grottesco,  Noctuary, and The Nightmare Factory.