Scott Bradfield

Scott Bradfield (born 27 April 1955) is an American essayist, critic, fiction writer and university lecturer best known for his short stories, of which he has had four collections published. The 1998 film Luminous Motion, for which he wrote the screenplay, was based on his first novel, The History of Luminous Motion (1989).

The History of Luminous Motion (1989)

 * He opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the stove. Pedro ate most of it, sponging up the red chili sauce with slices of his doughy Wonderbread. "This is a hard fast world we live in, kiddo—and I'm telling you this as a friend, now. All this teary-eyed feeling sorry for yourself childhood crap just doesn't work—doesn't work for long, anyway. I can promise you that. I mean, your mom wants you to have this idyllic childhood and all. She thinks this is Camelot or something, your childhood. Well, I want you to know, kiddo. I looked up 'idyllic' in the dictionary and I wouldn't hold my breath. I wouldn't lie in bed all day just waiting for some idyllic childhood to come along."
 * Ch.5 - p.35 [Page numbers per the First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, August 1990]


 * "Sometimes I don't know," Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. "Sometimes I don't know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way."
 * Ch.12 - p.101


 * "You know what Christmas means? It means if I love you, I'm going to buy you a whole load of crap. The more I love you, the bigger the load gets. Sometimes, if you can afford it, you can get your loved one literally tons of crap, and then they're really loved. Love, love, love. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. Buy some more crap. Come on, line up and buy yourselves a whole lot more crap. Here's something nice. Bought any crap quite like this crap recently? Crap crap crap. Ho ho ho. Like that mechanical Santa Claus in the Montgomery Ward's window display. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, everybody. Have yourselves all one fucking hell of a merry little Christmas, all you poor stupid saps. Line up and get taken, that's what I say, that's what Santa says. We take MasterCard cards and Visa cards. Come on, losers. Line up on this side. Get your money taken on that side."
 * Ch.13 - p.109, 110


 * I turned. The schoolground seemed to be glowing. It wasn't like night so much as like night on some high-tech movie set. Invisible machines operated everywhere. Hidden technicians monitored, taped, replayed and edited. Truth could be collapsed and disarranged. Life was not fact, but montage. I might even be an actor playing somebody else's role. My mind might be a stage upon which some cultural drama played.
 * Ch.18 - p.157


 * The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.
 * Ch.19 - p.163