I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.
Horror, for me, has to involve some sort of fantasy. Horror is something that is in your dreams or your nightmares.
If I retire doing the character, I don't think the character has to retire. There will still be caricatures of Elvira. You know, Dracula still works, and he's dead.
I've probably said a million times in my life something about, "All those people are just lemmings. They'd follow each other off a cliff. " Well, no such thing.
I can't tell you how exciting it was, because Vincent Price had made a huge impression on me when I was a little kid. I just loved him in films. And so meeting him and becoming friends with him was a big deal for me.
People think, "Oh my god, you've been doing this job for so many years, it must get boring. " It's like, "No, hell no," because I get to sing, I get to dance, I get to be on TV and in films, I get to do merchandising, licensing, show up at conventions, write, or take photographs for my book. There are so many different things going on for me that it never gets boring. It's always fun and interesting.
I had this grand idea that Elvira's kind of the Santa Claus of Halloween - at the malls, you'd have an Elvira there. Girls would dress as Elvira just like guys dress as Santa Claus, and it's not the real thing, but they'll pose for pictures, sign autographs. Of course, I couldn't go around to every mall, so we'd have to get more Elviras.
The greatest opportunity of our lives is to wake ourselves up and get going. There is so much to be done and so little time to do it. We should impress ourselves with the seriousness of slothfulness.
The weird thing is when you're a gay guy my age, I spent so much of my life just thinking I was probably never going to date anyone, so now just thinking, "all right, settle down and have a child" seems ridiculous to me.
Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning.
The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.