As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own! Melissa de la Cruz
I always thought of vampires, especially the young-adult ones, as a metaphor for sex - sucking blood, forbidden, taboo. I think they just ooze sex. Vampires are all the big themes in life in one attractive, bloodsucking package. Melissa de la Cruz
Dark books do appeal to kids because they have nice, sheltered lives - and they also appeal to children who are going through pretty hard times themselves. Melissa de la Cruz
Just because I worked in fashion doesn't mean I didn't go to see 'Underworld' three times! Melissa de la Cruz
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. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
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.Justin Cronin
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. Justin Cronin
I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels. Justin Cronin