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.

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!

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.

We've got one life and the older we get the more we come to realize how short it is.

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.

Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.

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.

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.

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 I've found that to talk too much about movies is the kiss of death. If it happens then it happens, is all.

Now, after 18 years, not a sign of Lovecraft in my work.

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.