Brian Masters > Quotes

“Shower while there were two dead bodies in the bathtub, and he was sane. He drilled holes in the heads of living people to make them his unresisting companions, and he was sane. He ate a bicep which he fried in a skillet, tenderised and sprinkled with sauce, and he was sane. For hours he lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them, and he was sane. He kept eleven assorted heads and skulls, and two complete skeletons, for eventual use in a home-made temple, and he was sane.”
― Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

“Reality poisons the spring of fantasy, whereas fantasy, when it erupts into the real world, brings destruction in its wake.”
― Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

“Anonymous sex, he wrote, ‘only deepens one’s sense of loneliness and solves nothing.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“The small objects belonging to the dead became part of the household. I did not feel that it was theft as their owners hadn’t really gone away.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“sounds absurd, but Nilsen may partly have murdered in anguished assault against social injustice; he was not killing individuals, but society itself.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“I was the forlorn seeker after a relationship which was always beyond my reach.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Taking the body from under the boards, he sat it on a dining-chair, but left the carrier bag over its head as he did not want to look at the face.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“All of us conceal in conversation clues to personality which we happily reveal on paper, because the added distance of writing lends protection and encourages the risks of intimacy.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“After the third killing in May 1980 he says he was growing less and less ‘emotional’ about it and was simply resigned to the knowledge that he was a compulsive killer.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Sex in its natural place is like the signature at the end of a letter. Written on its own, it is less than nothing. Signatures are easy to sign, good letters far more difficult.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Colleagues at work found him talkative and articulate, but occasionally boring, and he lacked the sense to recognise when he had said enough (even when other people held newspapers in front of their faces) and went on talking as if the most profound interest had been shown.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Strichen House, now derelict, was once the home of the Lords Lovat, a branch of the same Fraser family which had built Fraserburgh, and on the top of Mormond Hill are the ruins of Hunter’s Lodge, which Lord Lovat used to take for shooting parties.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: The case of Dennis Nilsen

“sometimes imagine that I may have felt that I applied a relieving pressure on a life as a benevolent act, in that the subjects were ultimately free from life’s pain.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“must be the most wonderful gift to be able to throw your arms around someone and just weep,’ he wrote.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Madness has its own logic.”
― Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer

“Power of responsibility was nil at these times. There was fear afterwards, with a massive and suppressed remorse.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Fraserburgh Castle whose remaining tower had since been converted to a lighthouse. This, too, held a mystery, for everyone knew the legend of the laird’s daughter who threw herself from a window to the rocks below with the body of her forbidden lover in her arms.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: The case of Dennis Nilsen

“I looked at a photo of Martyn Duffey today and it shocked me seeing him so lifelike in that photo and dead, gone, destroyed by me, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“(‘I had a feeling of easing his burden with my strength’)”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Emotions are the most toxic substances known to man,’ wrote Nilsen.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Through the night it is a nice relaxing feeling to have someone warm beside you in bed.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“I never sensed the feeling of killing as such, only a feeling of stopping something terrible from happening, a compulsion to squeeze the person by the throat to relieve and absolve him and me from something terrible.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“I would dismiss these intrusive thoughts as though these events had happened to someone else other than me.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“He felt that both parts of his life were continually ‘spying on each other’, and developed the ability to step into and out of either world.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“I had a feeling of hopelessness, grief, and a sense of emptiness, and even if I knew the body to be dead I felt that the personality was still within, aware and listening to me.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: Case of Dennis Nilsen

“Sixteen months later, police officers searched the garden at various points indicated by Nilsen, and recovered over a thousand items of bone.”
― Brian Masters, Killing for Company: The case of Dennis Nilsen