If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less.
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.
I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.
I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.
Protect your voice and your vision. If going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don’t do it. … Do what gets you to write and not what blocks you. … Don’t take any guff off anybody.
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
I do want to go another way - to write something completely different.
I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.
Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible.
I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.
... what I fear in writing is the safe decision.
When I write something, every word of it is meant. I can't say it enough.
Sometimes dreams show me that my writing should go deeper. Dreams have not so much changed my work as deepened it.
When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.
Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.
If I haven't put that on a T-shirt, I'm going to. Actually, I really don't want to write anything that can't be put on a T-shirt. Actually I'd like to write only on T-shirts. Actually, I'd like to write whole novels on T-shirts. So you guys could say, 'I'm wearing chapter 8 of Lestat's new book, that's my favorite; oh I see you're wearing chapter 6-
I don't know why one author writes westerns while another writes detective novels. You don't know why. You go where the intensity is. I feel most comfortable writing about monsters. It's possible that I feel like a monster myself. Or maybe it's because we all have a monster inside of us, a vampire, a ghost, a witch or a werewolf. You do it because it works and it feels really right and authentic.
People write to me all the time to tell me that "homosexuality is an abomination." They base this on a quote in Leviticus. I think the Bible has proved to be a very mysterious and dangerous document.
