Whats novelist Thomas Harris like?
He’s not exactly Mr. Personality or the life of the party. You wouldn’t want to be a drinking buddy with this guy. He’s just very quiet, more of a loner. Kind of an asocial guy. He’s very thorough, though. He would sit in on classes in my criminal psychology class at the FBI Academy. I was just beginning to develop profiling at that time, going into the penitentiaries — not to ask Hannibal Lecter, “Help us catch someone.” Nothing like that. Just going in and conducting interviews about individual crimes. No one had ever done that before. A lot of people who deal with criminals and who are making decisions for probation and parole don’t want to know about the crime. What I’ve always said is, “To understand the artist, you must look at the art work.” Harris saw this kind of stuff. And then what he did was he took a composite. Hannibal Lecter does not really exist. There is no one, thank goodness, like him. I think it’s more scary that there are people like Buffalo Bill. He is a composit
