Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

The whole theme of Interview with the Vampire was Louis’s quest for meaning in a godless world. He searched to find the oldest existing immortal simply to ask, What is the meaning of what we...

I’m usually working on my own mythology, my own realm of created characters. Stories in mythology inspire me, though I may not be conscious of it.

My stories are never quite good enough.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

No lady is ever a gentleman.

I was raised as a Christian but the transaction has to be made by yourself – you and God – at some point.

When you come to Christ as a real young person, I think when you become a teen-ager either you rebel or you search, doubt, and wonder.

There’s no reason you should write any novel quickly.

It’s true that every day away from work requires two more days to get back into it.

A theater person should know what holds an audience and what does not.

Fields are won by those who believe in the winning.

I don’t want to do business with those who don’t make a profit, because they can’t give the best service.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

The good old days are now.

I’m always looking, and I’m always asking questions.

At most I’ll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less.

Only very brave mouse makes nest in cat’s ear.

Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.

I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.

Knowing what I do now, I certainly wouldn’t decide to write a first novel because I wouldn’t have anything like the necessary life experience.

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.

Learning is finding out what you already know.

At that point, I sat down and made an alphabetical list of all the crime related words I could think of. So here I am now, nearly half-way through, probably tied up until the year...

I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.

Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

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...