"Why, you may ask, didn't we have a cow tonight? No one would sell Bayard one. He had the brilliant idea of telling the farmers why he wanted the cow. The God-fearing folk would sell their cows to be eaten, but not for raising zombies. Prejudiced bastards."

"I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn't write or read horror or fantasy, other than children's fantasy, until I was in my teens."

"There's Only so much emotional super glue in a person's soul, that everything just stays broken."

"Love is too precious to be ashamed of."

"I'm sorry I have issues with my boyfriend doing other men. I'm sorry I have issues with me doing other men. Why was I always being made to feel guilty because I wasn't having sex with more people? Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?"

"Sometimes you deal with the devil not because you want to, but because if you don't, someone else will."

"I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face,I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you, Meredith, and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine."

"Can the sarcasm,' he said. 'Please, I always use fresh sarcasm, never canned."

"He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath."

"He will not let you come barging in to his world like the proverbial bull in the china shop."

"Some people just don't seem to understand the concept of fiction. It is fiction; it ain't true, folks."

"I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print."

"There had to be a circle of Hell where you were eternally fourteen, eternally in junior high. One of the lower circles."

"Readers respond to every genre intensely, if it's a genre that appeals to them. Again, who can say why anyone enjoys horror and dark fantasy? If I can't answer the question for myself, I wouldn't dream of trying to answer it for others."

"I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I'm not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner."

"I'm dating three men, living with two more, and having occasional sex with two others. That's seven men. I'm like a pornographic Snow White. I think seven is plenty."

"People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening."

"I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys."

"Nothing is more appealing than a handsome man who is also uncertain of himself."

"Vampires are people too!"

"Vampires were always either trying to kill me, or own me. God I hated being popular."

"Give a truly good person power, and they're still a good person. Give a bad person power, and they're still a bad person. The question is always about the person in between. The one that isn't evil, or good, but just ordinary. You don't always know what an ordinary person is like on the inside."

"Revenge was always the easy part, the hard part was living with it afterward."

"Most of the monsters... are based on some sort of mythology. Every culture and even some geographical areas have monsters and mythology that is their own."

"I wasn't like most girls."

"He held Saraid the rest of the way home, and in a way she held him right back, because sometimes and especially for a man, being able to be someone's big strong shoulder to cry on helps you not need to cry so very much yourself."

"Trust me, Anita, if you get dead, especially if he blames himself in any way, he will be a force of destruction looking for a place to be aimed. And he's blamed himself for introducing you to Olaf here from the get-go. If Olaf did to you what he's done to some of his other victims, Edward would drown the world in blood to erase those images."

"I didn't want to pick at Micah and me until we unraveled. I wanted to leave it alone and enjoy it. I just didn't know how to do that."

"One thing I've learned about vampires--they keep pulling new rabbits out of their cloaks. Big, fanged, carnivorous bunnies that'll eat your eyeballs if you're not paying attention."

"If I'd been easily discouraged, I could have been a one-hit wonder."

"Death didn't bother me much. Strong Christian and all that. Method of death did. Being eaten alive. One of my top three ways not to go out."

"I feel that if you are blessed, or lucky enough, to be doing well, you should help others."

"The Catholic Church sees voluntary vampirism as a kind of suicide. I tend to agree. Though the Pope also excommunicated all animators, unless we ceased raising the dead. Fine; I became Episcopalian."

"I'd never met coffee that wasn't wonderful. It was just a matter of how wonderful it was."

"I cannot do it. I cannot bear it. I cannot go back to what I was here. I cannot stand at her side and watch another take her. I am not that strong or that good."

"If you're alive, don't move, if you're dead, don't worry about it."

"Two things I do well in books are sex and violence, but I don't want gratuitous sex or violence. The sex and violence are only as graphic as need be. And never included unless it furthers the plot or character development."

"Easy does it, boys. I just need help standing, not flying."

"One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane."

"There was a tinge of evil to it, a lot of sex, but under that was alittle boy peeking out, an uncertain little boy. That was it. That was the attraction. Nothing is moreappealing than a handsome man who is also uncertain of himself."

"The tears were back, stinging just behind my eyes. There was blood all over my penguins. I didn't give a damn about the walls and carpet. They could be replaced, but I'd collected those damned stuffed toys over years."

"It wasn't just my beast's hunger, but Jean-Claude's blood thirst and Richard's craving for flesh. It was all that and the ardeur running through all of it, so that one hunger fed into the next in an endless chain, a snake eating it's own tail, an Ouroboros of desires."

"Patience is a virtue, but there comes a moment when you must stop being patient and take the day by the throat and shake it. If it fights back; fine. I'd rather end up bloody at the end of the day, then unhurt with no progress made, no knowledge gained. I'd rather have a no, then nothing. I'd forgotten that about myself."

"You either mellow at 30, or your head explodes - take your choice."

"Still it might be nice, once in a while, not to have to choose between evils. Just once, couldn't I choose the lesser good?"

"Because everything worth having hurts."

"Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go."

"My father had taught me to be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you've been mean to someone, they won't believe the nice anymore. So be nice, be nice, until it's time to stop being nice, then destroy them."

"You can't kill us all, human.' He was right. I raised the machine gun a little. 'True, but who's going to be first in line?"

"And there you go again, that tone in your voice, never a word out of place, but your tone says clearly, 'You are a fucking psycho bitch and I hate you."