Victor Lodato
Victor Lodato is the author of two critically acclaimed novels. EDGAR AND LUCY was called "a riveting and exuberant ride" by the New York Times, and MATHILDA SAVITCH, winner of the PEN USA Award, was hailed as "a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel." MATHILDA SAVITCH, a "Best Book of the Year" according to The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail, won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and has been published in sixteen countries.
Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.
Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.
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“The problem is, at a certain point you can't stop thinking even if you want to. I swear, sometimes you just wish you could go back into the dark like a primitive person. But you cant, that's the problem with evolution. Once you have a little bit of knowledge, more of it just keeps coming at you like birds around a bagel. Sometimes when I learn things, I wish I hadn't learned them.”
“If I could have one magical power it would be to get inside someone else's head, even just for a second, so that I could know what's important to other people, who they love and who they hate. You might treat certain people differently if you knew what was really in their heart.”
“...not everything in your heart makes it to your mouth. A lot of it gets lost on the way.”
“There is no imagination in the world. A person like me is basically alone. If I want to live in the same world as other people I have to make a special effort.”
“Sick people should look sick, like in fairy tales or on television. They shouldn 't be wearing sexy dresses and shaving their legs. How was I supposed to know she was about to disappear?”
“Wenn ich alleine fernsehe, habe ich meine eigenen Regeln und schalte nur ab, nachdem etwas Gutes passiert ist, oder so, dass die letzten Worte, die man hört, einen nicht verletzen. Man will doch nicht abschalten, wenn zwei Leute mitten im Streit sind oder wenn jemand gerade 'Schwein' sagt oder 'Tod' oder 'Mein Auto ist verreckt'.”
“Religion verdummt die Leute, wie mein Vater sagt.”
“Ich gebe Jesus das Oben-Unten-Zeichen und trete näher, weil er sich ja hauptsächlich zeigen will. Sein Körper ist nicht schlecht. Dünn, aber mit Muskeln. Man könnte sich vorstellen, dass er regelmäßig Joggen oder Schwimmen war.”
“A person's heart is a disgusting thing. You almost can't look at it.”
“I went to sleep feeling like a terrorist. But I wasn't going to kill people, I was going to bring them back to life. That's a whole different kind of terror. It's the terror of god.”
“When the people you love become animals it's awful. You're half afraid to even go near them.”
“What a night, I'm telling you. Odious. Odious with cherries on top.”
“Isn't language amazing? I can't get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and its like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don't know if its disgusting or beautiful.”
“Time is funny lately, nothing to do with clocks.”
“Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.”
“The thing is, I can't love her, not in the real world. Because this would be degrading to me. To love someone who despises you, and she just might. You should see her eyes on me sometimes. Plus she's not even a mother anymore, she's just a planet with a face. Da at least has hands.”
“Birds are the lunatics of the animal world.”
“I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it's night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn't slip, that's how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse.”