Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

I kind of always think my work is unfilmable, and when I meet people who are interested in filming it, I'm always stunned.

Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?

It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.

There are many difficult things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them.

Hup hup ha ha hammy hee hee!

Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was onstage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me.