I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.
There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.
I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
I was really the first-line editor of the 'House of Night' series. I didn't write that much of the story, and I didn't know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.
The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.
A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.
There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author's job to point it out.
Writers are the engineers of human souls.
I leave my editor to put the periods and commas in.
I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.
