Anne Rice Quotes

Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!

Don't be a fool for the Devil, darling.

Claudia... you've been a very very naughty little girl.

I am the Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal more or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.

I will be the Vampire Lestat for all to see. A symbol, a freak of nature - something loved, something despised all of those things. I tell you I can't give it up. I can't miss. And quite frankly I am not in the least afraid." - Lestat, The Vampire Lestat, p. 532

Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.

-You are on the verge of being truly mad. -No, not at all. Look at me. I can tie my shoelaces. See?

If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less.

None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.

Evil is just a point of view

When you think night and day and every moment only of pleasing me, things will be very easy for you.

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.

Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.

When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.

Everyone is a potential naked slave to you once you become a trainer.

We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.

A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.

I left Christianity because I wanted to be a moral person. That is why I left. I no longer believed in its lies.

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.

The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?... Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.

That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became.

And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.

I was obsessed with religious questions, the basics: Why are we here? Why is the world so beautiful?

Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets - as vast and indestructible as nature itself.

As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.

Cities have distinct personalities. It's a matter of knowing it.

In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ASK. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.

The human heart is my school.

The whole theme of Interview with the Vampire was Louis's quest for meaning in a godless world. He searched to find the oldest existing immortal simply to ask, What is the meaning of what we are?

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.

For me, places have a tremendous impact. I fall in love with places. All of life seems different in different places.

I love New Orleans physically. I love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days. I have a beautiful house here.

I stumble through a carnival of horrors

The highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world.

I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.

I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.