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.

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

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

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

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