I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

Everything we do in life, we do with certain expectations.

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.

Perhaps this is the only real evil left.

Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.

It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.