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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book. "

" The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That's my immortality. And I shouldn't try to mortgage theirs for my benefit. "

" I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid. "

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

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

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

Science Fiction

" My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain. "

" I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 like creating villains. "

" 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. "