Carla H. Krueger

All the best writers take risks, offend people often and say fuck you to the critics.

When I write, I try to represent the voices of people I've known who had no voice.

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.

Only men with intelligence, confidence and absolutely no empathy at all can progress upstairs.

Each day of the week, Kalist indulges himself in a different, secret ritual. On Mondays, he wears cologne. On Tuesdays, he eats meat for lunch. On Wednesdays, he places a bet after work. On Thursdays, he smokes one cigarette (but claims he__ not a smoker). On Fridays, he treats himself to his favourite pastime: horse practice _ he grew up with horses and likes to try and emulate their distinctive whinnies, snorts, neighs, snuffles, sighs, grunts, fluttering nostrils, the occasional aggressive outburst and the especially beautiful nicker of a mare to her foal. And, on Saturdays, lest we forget, Maxwell D. Kalist drinks wine from a chalice.

Don__ mock my suggestions, Ridley _ one day in the near future, they might just save your life._ Maxwell D. Kalist.

To Kalist, Baumauer__ just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.

You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined._ Maxwell D. Kalist.

Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people _ and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?

I__ warning you because you__e young and vulnerable. He__ a dirty, lying, conniving piece of shit and he__ dangerous._ Gottfried Baumauer.

Shame comes in different doses.

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him _ a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Kv_tniv__ busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.

Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.

It__ late and most of the clerks are at home in their beds, dreaming of swimming in pools filled with real money.

He__ in a side room alone with her and it__ far too fucking hot.

Without pride, man becomes a parasite _ and there are already too many parasites.

Reading and writing dangerous books lets me be who I can't be and say what I can't say in everyday life.