For some reason, when people meet me and find out I’m a writer they always ask if I write children’s books. Um… please don’t let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are...

books.” The first book I ever read on my own was The Neverending Story. I studied classics at university, and in ancient literature, monsters, witches, magic, curses, and impossible machines aren’t genre, they’re just Tuesday...

…[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it...

So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.

I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

…I’ve never understood the logic that says a work doesn’t need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I’ve also never understood the...

Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel…but I never cared about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good...

Creativity is a commodity and derives its value only in how energy is spent.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer – not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi – though it is true that what...

At this point, a few words on this term ‘horror’ are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion ‘terror’,...

I love my career. It is a career. A difficult one that takes many hours and total dedication to my craft. It is also what I was born to do–tell stories and entertain.

People who make snide comments to authors like “anyone can write a book” or “well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can’t be that hard” or poke at a book because it’s “romance” or...