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I love British cursing - the cadence of it, the joy in the sound of the words, and the vulgarity of it.
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I'm not nearly as outrageously brave as many of my rascals that I write. But I think the rascal spirit must reside in me somewhere.
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I was baptized Methodist, but I was mainly raised First Church of NFL, which is to say that my family, especially my father, was much more concerned with watching football on Sundays than attending services.
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Like most people, I woke up one day to find that everyone I knew was taking antidepressants, and since I wasn't, I figured that I must be the cause of their depression.
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I think beta males on an evolutionary basis are much more successful than the alpha males are. You don't hear much about us, but there's a lot more of us out there.
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As an author, you spend a lot of time by yourself in a room making clicky noises. It gets pretty insulated. You realize pretty early on in your career that even if this goes well, you could spend all your life in a room alone. Unless you pick projects that are going to get you out doing things, you're not going to actually live your life.
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I've sort of made a reputation by high-stepping my way out of genre. As soon as somebody says, 'He does this,' I'm not standing there anymore.
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I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.
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I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.
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For me, 'Lamb' started out as a further exploration of the phenomenon of faith and the responsibility of a messiah that I touched on in 'Coyote Blue' and 'Island of the Sequined Love Nun,' but it ended up being an exploration of the true meaning of sacrifice, loyalty, and friendship.
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The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that.
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San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It's a great setting for a horror story.
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I have that special sort of novelist body of knowledge which is extraordinarily wide and very, very shallow. So I can usually answer the questions on 'Jeopardy,' but never the bonus question.
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I'm not afraid of getting into a subject I don't know much about.
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I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.
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You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you're dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it's a little more ambitious.
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One thing that's really delightful is my books tend to attract people who are funny, so I get the benefit of people writing me with things that crack me up.
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I don't read reviews if I know in advance they're negative, because I can't have my confidence undermined when I'm writing.
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When I was writing 'You Suck,' in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book's narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
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I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.
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I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.
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From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.
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I just finished a novel called 'Exult,' by Joe Quirk, last night. It's about hang gliding. I liked his first book, too, 'The Ultimate Rush.' I now know that I never, ever, ever want to go hang gliding, so that's good.
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My fans have great senses of humor and eat too much chocolate.