I’m fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.

My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

When I was a junior camp counselor and it was my job to tell the campers a bedtime story or devotional, I would tell them a rapture story.

The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.

It’s always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that’s the person I’m going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it’s...

That gentleman will call the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think they’re scared of him. They’re merely professional killers; he’s in advertising!

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.

I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

I was obsessed with religious questions, the basics: Why are we here? Why is the world so beautiful?

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it’s not supposed to be.

Every man must wear out at least one pair of fools shoes.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

He can’t imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much else what they find.

It wasn’t conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it...

It can’t possibly last for years and browsing has its limits. Only a certain amount is healthy or wise.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

After my years in Hollywood, I got tired of apologizing for work that really wasn’t mine to begin with.

I always liked spy stories.

The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.

I do want to go another way – to write something completely different.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don’t have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

Peace is our gift to each other.

To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don’t even see that...

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.

I don’t begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don’t mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences....

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

Too much good fortune can make you smug and unaware. Happiness should be like an oasis, the greener for the desert that surrounds it.

There are situations in life to which the only satisfactory response is a physically violent one. If you don’t make that response, you continually relive the unresolved situation over and over in your life.

Allow the world to live as it chooses, and allow yourself to live as you choose.

I was an English major in college with minors in Fine Arts and Humanities.

America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information.

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.