The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.
I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.
I find the ideas of Catholicism incredibly rich and inspiring. Bogus, unfortunately, but nonetheless inspiring. I think they always provide an interesting nexus through which to look at the way we are.
We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.
I'm constantly dogged with a feeling of fraudulence, so if somebody tells me they like what I've written, then I immediately begin to think it's rubbish.
The winter of 1991 found me stunned and shivering in the aftermath of an imploded love affair. Being 26, I flung myself actorishly on London and, without any intimations of my own ludicrousness, spent two years showing God what I thought of Him by letting myself go.
I still want magic, I find. The old fashioned kind. I don't believe in it, but I still have a hankering for it.
If being a werewolf is really a curse, you've got to treat it honorably. If werewolves are going to carry on, there has to be an incredibly powerful force. There is the business of the craving, the hunger for the kill. It has to be deeply pleasurable and more than an appetite for meat. There has to be a sensual dimension to it.
Until the age of thirteen, I tortured the waiting worlds of book illustration and professional football by shilly-shallying over which of them was going to get the benefit of my inestimable talents.
I don't think things happen for a reason, but I think it's perfectly possible to experience life meaningfully.
Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.
Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.
I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.
There are two ways to write a werewolf novel - you can examine the genre conventions, or you can say, 'What would it be like if I were a werewolf?'
We have all seen werewolf transformations hundreds of times on screen.
While I was writing 'The Last Werewolf,' I didn't watch any horror movies.
One of the things that seems absolutely clear to me about werewolves - with their canine makeup - is that they would be dogs, as it were.
Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation.
