Art & Creativity Quote by Brian Lumley

It lands like a humblebrag, but it’s really a sly flex about literary afterlife: not just being read, but being translated, circulated, and kept alive in another language’s bloodstream. Brian Lumley, best known for horror that mixes pulp velocity with mythic scaffolding, isn’t invoking Greek to sound lofty. He’s picking a language that still signals “canon” and “civilization” to English speakers, then undercutting that gravitas with the casual intimacy of “friends.” Not critics, not professors, not “my readership” - friends. The joke is that the prestige arrives secondhand, smuggled in through a social anecdote.

The specific intent feels twofold. First, it’s a wry rebuttal to the old genre snobbery that treats popular horror as disposable. If your supposedly “low” books are being read in Greek, the implication goes, maybe the gatekeepers aren’t the only ones qualified to assign value. Second, it’s a small victory lap about reach: translation is proof your work has traveled far enough to require re-homing, not just exporting.

Subtext: Lumley knows how ridiculous cultural status games are, and he’s playing them anyway - with a grin. Greek operates as a shorthand for permanence, while “I have friends” keeps the author from sounding like he’s chiseling his own epitaph. Context matters: coming up in a British scene where “literary” and “genre” often lived in separate zip codes, Lumley’s line is less about antiquity than about legitimacy earned the long way - through readers, not approval.