Top 70 Poppy Z. Brite Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

2. “Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

3. “I can’t heal your pain but I can see it. And you don’t have to be lost. Not forever.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

4. “If you want something, you don’t wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

5. “I’m your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you’ve become one?”

— Poppy Z. Brite

6. “My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

7. “Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

8. “Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

9. “When you have too much faith in something, it’s bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

10. “My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

11. “If you’re ever lucky enough to belong somewhere, if a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don’t desert it just because it can kill you. There are things more valuable than life.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

12. “But if I die without trying again, I’m a coward. I don’t mind having regrets about stuff I’ve done. It’s the regrets about stuff I haven’t done that bother me.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

13. “AS WE THINK, SO WE ARE;.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

14. “Let the night come. We are not afraid.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

15. “In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny – an experience I’ve never had in America!”

— Poppy Z. Brite

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

16. “With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

17. “You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

18. “They discovered that even in the face of pain that seems unbearable, even in the face of pain that wrings the last drop of blood out of your heart and leaves its scrimshaw tracery on the inside of your skull, life goes on. And pain grows dull, and begins to fade.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

19. “Delete nothing. Move nothing. Change nothing. Learn everything.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

20. “New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

21. “I don’t like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I’m working on now is definitely not horror.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

22. “I don’t think it is possible to give tips for finding one’s voice; it’s one of those things for which there aren’t really any tricks or shortcuts, or even any advice that necessarily translates from writer to writer. All I can tell you is to write as much as possible.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

23. “Death doesn’t hurt,” said one of the twins, and a light came into his silver eyes. “Death is dark, death is sweet.” The other twin took up the litany. “Death is all that lasts forever. Death is eternal beauty.” “Death is a lover with a thousand tongues – ” “A thousand insect caresses – ” “Death is easy.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

24. “Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

25. “I press my hands against my chest, wishing I could somehow be even closer to him. I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

26. “If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him – word choice, sentence structure, motifs? – and think about why you’re doing it.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

27. “Young writers shouldn’t be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It’s a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don’t publish too many of the results.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

28. “A heart like an artichoke?” “Oui. He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

29. “You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

30. “Celebrities, even insignificant ones like me, are created to be abused by the Great Unwashed.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

31. “At some point you have to start letting people save their own life.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

32. “Help the ones you love, his grandmother had told him, help them when you can, and after that, mind your business. Your gift doesn’t give you the right to go rearranging other people’s lives for them. You might see their souls, but they won’t always want you to be their mirror.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

33. “Sometimes we gotta be brave even when we’re scared. We gotta not let being scared keep us from thinkin’ straight. That’s all brave is, boy, when you come right down to it, not lettin’ the fear get you so turned around you start doin’ stupid things, instead of what you know you ought to do.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

34. “I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t lived here for several years.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

35. “I’ve certainly learned a great deal from my husband, though, and could never have written a book like Liquor without him and the people he introduces me to and the stories he brings home.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

36. “All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone’s face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone’s skull. The power to make another person crazy with pleasure instead of fear and pain, to have every cell in another person’s body at your thrall.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

37. “Never relinquish your terrors. That’s when they catch you.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

38. “I just want to know how you’re made,” Trevor breathed in his ear. “I love you so much, Zach. I want to climb inside you. I want to taste your brain. I want to feel your heart beating in my hands.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

39. “No”, said a voice from the dark doorway. A weary voice, a voice for speaking long after midnight, a voice to be used when all paths are blocked, when castles have fallen to ruins, when morning will not come again.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

40. “And what was I if not death’s ghostwriter?”

— Poppy Z. Brite

41. “If you’re a freelance writer and aren’t used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

42. “Ah, relationships. If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

43. “Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

Featured in: Fun Quotes

44. “My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery – which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

45. “I like visiting peoples homes on Saint Josephs Day, when people set up altars, serve food as a tribute to the saint, and invite the public – I enjoy that much more than Mardi Gras.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

46. “There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it’s not enough for them to hate me, they can’t stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!”

— Poppy Z. Brite

47. “In high school I was the dog, always, and I never have felt comfortable or right in my body, and part of my whole exhibitionist thing has probably been a way of testing to see whether or not I really was this repulsive creature that I felt like for so long.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

48. “My grandmother told me you shouldn’t try to define evil, that the minute you think you’ve got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will sneak up behind you and jump inside your head. I don’t think anyone knows what evil is. I don’t think anyone has the right to say.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

49. “Yielding flesh in his hands, hot with fear, sticky with sweat and blood and already smelling of heaven. Helpless bones his to crack, helpless skin his to rip open, sweet red river his to drink from. He had to do it. He had to know. With his eyes and his hands, with all his body, he had to see.”

— Poppy Z. Brite

50. “Atheists loved to use that term to describe some shadowy force that somehow controlled human destiny, but what the hell did they think the universe was? Did they think the stars and nebulae took an interest in their doings, and if they really meant God, why couldn’t they just say so?”

— Poppy Z. Brite