If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.

Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.

I remember when I watched 'Hellraiser' with my mother. She cried when she saw my name in the opening credits, and I had to tell her that that was the happiest she was going to be for the next two hours.