A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!
Brian Lumley
If, like Harry Keogh, I could talk to the dead - God, there are an awful lot of people I would like to speak to! Not least my father. Being in the army for 22 years, I didn't see enough of him, and I know there are a great many things I could have learned from him.
But there's a little guy who sits astride my brain with a whip, and if I'm away from the machine for more than a couple of hours during the day, this little guy's lashing away.
German readers are much like Brits or Americans: They read for the thrill of it, the occasional shudder down the spine, knowing it's not real - but looking over their shoulders anyway, just in case.
The Army was my bread and butter.
If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience.
I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.
But other vampire stories? Well, no, I really haven't read too many, and I can't say I'm crazy about romantic vampires anyway - to me the vampire is simply an evil monster.
I have friends who read my books in Greek.
But I've found that to talk too much about movies is the kiss of death. If it happens then it happens, is all.
And I have to consider myself fortunate, because there are plenty of writers who spend most of a lifetime looking for that certain something without ever finding it.
I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore.
Now, after 18 years, not a sign of Lovecraft in my work.
The amazing thing now is that most of those so-called critics who were telling me to find my own voice seem to have lost theirs.
Now, when I was in the Army, writing was my hobby.
There are lots of other things that I haven't done, places I haven't seen. So eventually I'll have to find time for those things while there still is time.
We've got one life and the older we get the more we come to realize how short it is.
Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.
