“And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.”

“Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.”

“Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.”

“I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.”

“I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.”

“I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.”

“I like creating villains.”

“I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.”

“I was very much a child of the Cold War.”

“If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.”

“If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.”

“If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.”

“I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.”

“I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.”

“I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.”

“My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.”

“My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.”

“One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.”

“One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.”

“One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.”

“One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.”

“So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.”

“The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That's my immortality. And I shouldn't try to mortgage theirs for my benefit.”

“There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.”

“Vampires have always been hot. They are one of our most durable monsters. It's one of those stories that galvanizes us early and it's always going on.”

“When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.”