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" I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all. "

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" I find the ideas of Catholicism incredibly rich and inspiring. Bogus, unfortunately, but nonetheless inspiring. I think they always provide an interesting nexus through which to look at the way we are. "

" I'm constantly dogged with a feeling of fraudulence, so if somebody tells me they like what I've written, then I immediately begin to think it's rubbish. "

" What I've absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films. "

" We have all seen werewolf transformations hundreds of times on screen. "

" Until the age of thirteen, I tortured the waiting worlds of book illustration and professional football by shilly-shallying over which of them was going to get the benefit of my inestimable talents. "

" One of the things that seems absolutely clear to me about werewolves - with their canine makeup - is that they would be dogs, as it were. "

" Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation. "

" There are two ways to write a werewolf novel - you can examine the genre conventions, or you can say, 'What would it be like if I were a werewolf?' "

" If being a werewolf is really a curse, you've got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it. "

" In a fit of pique, I said to my agent, 'I'm going to write something you can sell.' The idea was to write a straight page-turner, with no literary conceits. "

" Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much. "

" Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that. "

" My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children. "

" I am a man of lost faiths. "

" I used to believe in signs, omens, patterns, secret purpose, synchronicities. "

" My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate. "

" I'm too conceited for therapy. "

" For a long time, I'd wanted to write a book that I would be proud and happy and psychologically and morally comfortable about my parents' reading. "

" Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams. "

" I still want magic, I find. The old fashioned kind. I don't believe in it, but I still have a hankering for it. "

" I will waste an extraordinary amount of time, you know. And if it's not watching television, I'll be sitting staring out of the window. And yes, I know there's the idea of the artist, sitting there doing nothing while things are going on, but actually, no. It's vacant space. I'm thinking about the laundry. "

" For the minimum-wager with Caligulan needs, the glory days are soon over. "

" I'm not quite sure when I began to be troubled by the creeping sense of my own ludicrousness, but it persisted - and eventually grew into a fascination. I started writing about it. Thus, in His characteristically mysterious way, the Lord made clear His plans for me. "

" I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between. "

" Everyone is obsessed with air fresheners. We associate smell with disgust. But we're all locked into the body; we can't escape it. "

" There are, I'm depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt. "

" Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity. "

" As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write. "

" I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated. "

" The winter of 1991 found me stunned and shivering in the aftermath of an imploded love affair. Being 26, I flung myself actorishly on London and, without any intimations of my own ludicrousness, spent two years showing God what I thought of Him by letting myself go. "