I dare say she means to keep you from his attentions. Your honour demands she be slain.

But there are others of my kind...those who see themselves as lions among sheep. As kings--superior to man in every way. Why, then, should they be confined to darkness? Why should they fear man?

If you're Stephen King and you have a massive body of huge-selling well-respected work, you can pivot and do whatever you want. I don't have that body of work, I don't have that audience that's comfortable with me enough yet to follow my bliss with me.

I feel rather like a rabbit that has taken a fox for its pupil.

Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

Surely life has taught you that a thing can be both beautiful and vile.