Poppy Z. Brite Quotations

You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.

My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.

There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!

I like visiting peoples homes on Saint Josephs Day, when people set up altars, serve food as a tribute to the saint, and invite the public - I enjoy that much more than Mardi Gras.

Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.

In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other.

Why bother? I was right all along: the second you make yourself vulnerable to someone, they start drawing blood.

Mostly I enjoy the restaurants (my husband is a chef), though I wish we had a wider diversity of ethnic food.

If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.