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ANNE RICE: Research, to me, is fun. I enjoy reading. I enjoy discovering unusual things. I love reading about unusual places, but I also go to those places. And I like to write about them after I've been there. I've been, for example, to the Holy Land twice. And that was very important research for me, just standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and putting my hands in the water, and looking at the mountains that surround the Sea of Galilee, that was extremely important research. That was invaluable. But I also like to read and read and read, and research inspires. You know some relative fact will inspire me. I'll see a whole story spring to life. Because of some little incident, say, in history by Josephus, or fire of Alexandria. I can say, I'll write in the margin, a whole novel here, a whole story. And I'll underline. And so to me, research has always been like eating ice cream and chocolate. I mean, it's great fun, and I have, indeed, gone to a morgue, and looked at a dead body, as a part of research. I did that, and I asked a policeman to take me in New Orleans, and actually paid him, sort of, a consultant fee, and he took me in the city morgue, and showed me a body there. And I forced myself to look at that body. It was a very painful experience. And that was part of my research, because I felt I needed that, and I use that then in a series of books called The Witching Hour books. I described the morgue, and I described what the whole experience was like. But the main thing about research is this, it's never really work for me. It's inspiration. I really love doing research. But I don't think-- I think it varies from writer to writer. I was at a writer's workshop once, where a woman was working on a novel about her ancestors in Russia, and the people in the workshop actually told her that novels weren't written from research, and that she was doing the wrong thing, researching her ancestors, and their village in Russia. And I remember sitting there being outraged, because I thought, how dare they tell this writer this. I mean, obviously she's being inspired by what she's discovering in her research. There's so many ways to research. There's so many ways to write. It's outrageous when any one writer tells another writer that that's not the way to go about it. I had a sophomore English teacher in college tell me that I wasn't a real writer, because I didn't write with a pencil. I wrote on a typewriter. She said, that's all well for a journalist, but not for real writers. How dare somebody make a statement like that. I do all my writing on keyboards. And they have to be fast keyboards, fast typewriters, fast computers. And yet there was that person telling me, in essence, you're not a writer. And she did give me a B in the class, because she said that my sentences were too long.