ANNE RICE: I think it's wonderful to let these characters emerge and get in dialogue with each other. Argue, fight, have things come out in dialogue. I like to write dialogue. I like very much to have characters reveal themselves in dialogue. I like to do that rather than to try to sum up a character from another character's point of view. And that's fairly recent with me. My early books, I think I tended more to describe characters through the eyes of others. For me, learning how to write dialogue came from reading writers who knew how to do it. And I think the first teacher I really had in that regard was Hemingway. And I love the way Hemingway wrote dialogue. And I studied his short stories and read his novels and very, very much was moved by the way he did it. And even now, I'll pick up Hemingway's stories to remind myself of how he does it. Like Cat in the Rain. Great story, with terrific dialogue. And another way that I learned dialogue, which I think many people might, I don't know, perhaps be surprised to hear, is by reading the detective fiction that was written by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Those guys wrote very intimate, natural dialogue. And you can't tell that those books were written, what, 75 years ago, 60 years ago. I mean, they could have been written right now, you know. And there are reasons for that. There are reasons for why the language isn't changing as rapidly as it did in the past. But I went back before I wrote The Vampire Lestat I thought, I want to really be intimate with this character of Lestat. And I actually read Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain to learn how to do that. And they helped me loosen up a lot. They helped me talk in short sentences and make that dialogue sharper and fresher and more intimate. That's the whole thing, is intimacy. I think it's so hard-- I think it's so hard to stay intimate with your characters, intimate with the dialogue, and intimate with the moment. You can slip away from that. You can be drawn off into thinking perhaps you have to give more description of the village. And you need to stick with that character and what the character feels. At least I do. And again, you have to hear that dialogue in your head. And I talk out loud while I'm writing. And if somebody comes in the room, they'll see me mumbling at the computer like a mad person because I say all the lines out loud. And I go back and I revise to get them exactly right.