Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I’ve always felt that I wasn’t a member of any particular group.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

I spend about a year between novels.

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

Of course, bad marriages are so pervasive that they have invaded the faith community too.

When I was still in prep school – 14, 15 – I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about...

To be knocked out doesn’t mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

I used to think I had ambition… but now I’m not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They’re easily confused.

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible.

Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection.

I’m not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey’s perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been...

Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.

Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he’s not spoken of enough.

The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.

My writing day has grown shorter as I’ve aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

Patriotism is the religion of hell.

Ironically, in today’s marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really...

There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

My success is not who I am.

Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

In order to win, you must expect to win.

Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.

The human condition today is better than it’s ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.

I’m going to keep on dealing with the supernatural in a lot of ways.

But what I hope for from a book – either one that I write or one that I read – is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don’t want to think of...

This is unexpected… like squirt from aggressive grapefruit.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim...

I don’t see success as the goal. Obedience is the goal.

I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told...

My work caused me to interview hundreds of women about their lives and their problems.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.

Books are like movies of the mind and it’s better to leave Kinsey where she is.

I met an American woman and got married so I had to get a job.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

I’m definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there’s no doubt about that.

The world doesn’t need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they’d be good at.

To teach one’s self is to be forced to learn twice.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.

People are scared to death and they’re looking for something beyond themselves.