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.
Glen Duncan
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.
I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.
I am a man of lost faiths.
I used to believe in signs, omens, patterns, secret purpose, synchronicities.
For the minimum-wager with Caligulan needs, the glory days are soon over.
My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.
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.
As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.
What I've absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films.
I'm not quite sure when I began to be troubled by the creeping sense of my own ludicrousness, but it persisted - and eventually grew into a fascination. I started writing about it. Thus, in His characteristically mysterious way, the Lord made clear His plans for me.
I'm too conceited for therapy.
Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.
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.
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 don't think things happen for a reason, but I think it's perfectly possible to experience life meaningfully.
There are, I'm depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt.
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?'
While I was writing 'The Last Werewolf,' I didn't watch any horror movies.
We have all seen werewolf transformations hundreds of times on screen.
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'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.
If I'm going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
Everyone is obsessed with air fresheners. We associate smell with disgust. But we're all locked into the body; we can't escape it.
Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.
Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.
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.
In a fit of pique, I said to my agent, 'I'm going to write something you can sell.' The idea was to write a straight page-turner, with no literary conceits.
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 haven't won any prizes or had any best sellers.
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.
For a long time, I'd wanted to write a book that I would be proud and happy and psychologically and morally comfortable about my parents' reading.
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.
I will waste an extraordinary amount of time, you know. And if it's not watching television, I'll be sitting staring out of the window. And yes, I know there's the idea of the artist, sitting there doing nothing while things are going on, but actually, no. It's vacant space. I'm thinking about the laundry.
I still want magic, I find. The old fashioned kind. I don't believe in it, but I still have a hankering for it.
We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.
My position is that you've got to accommodate everything. I don't morally accommodate but imaginatively accommodate.
My family is Anglo-Indian, and of the four children, I'm the only one who wasn't born in India.
Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.
