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" One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality. "

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" There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go. "

Justin Cronin

Need

New

Direction

" I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse. "

" And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways. "

" One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent. "

" If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move. "

" I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood. "

" And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. "

" I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me. "

Justin Cronin

Business

Job

" My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one. "

" I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks. "

" I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice. "

" You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide. "

" One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career. "

" Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it. "

" I like creating villains. "

Justin Cronin

Villains

Creating

" I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels. "

Justin Cronin

Work

University

" Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person. "

" Writing is a job: you must show up. "

Justin Cronin

You

Writing

" If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it. "

" If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it. "

" I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad. "

Justin Cronin

Iowa

Teach

" I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day. "

" I was very much a child of the Cold War. "

" And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day. "

" So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are. "

" That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write. "

" My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run. "

" I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer. "

" Vampires have always been hot. They are one of our most durable monsters. It's one of those stories that galvanizes us early and it's always going on. "

Justin Cronin

Monsters

Hot

" When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation. "