Anne Rice quotes:

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  • 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.

  • What I did was take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Son of God, the Son of the Virgin Mary, and sought to make Him utterly believable, a vital breathing character.

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

  • First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

  • You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

  • We need to stop fighting Christian against Christian. I have no time for anything but trying to love other people. That is a full-time job.

  • I want to love all the children of God - Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist - everyone. I want to love gay Christians and straight Christians.

  • I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

  • Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.

  • My own funeral, I'd like to be laid out in a coffin in my own house. I would like my coffin to be put in the double parlor, and I would like all the flowers to be white.

  • Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

  • The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.

  • We have to become saints. We have to become like Christ. Anything less is simply not enough.

  • I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

  • I can't get very far away from Christianity, I can't get very far away from the angels and the saints. I work them in always, in some way.

  • Invest in a feather duster - the possibilities are endless.

  • I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.

  • Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.

  • That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

  • I know nothing of God or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that would damn or save my soul.

  • There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.

  • People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

  • I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

  • I'm going to keep on dealing with the supernatural in a lot of ways.

  • It is tragic that many in America think of us - Christians - as being people who hate others.

  • Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

  • I broke with my religion in college.

  • 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.

  • I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

  • I am in love with you', I responded.He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh.'Of course you are,' he replied. 'I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.'It was my turn to laugh.

  • You're the hunter, the warrior. You're stronger than anyone else here, that's your tragedy.

  • 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.

  • The human heart is my school.

  • No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.

  • Go ahead, throw this book away. Spit on me. Revile me. I dare you. Cast me out of your intellectual orbit. Throw me out of your backpack. Pitch me in the airport trash bin. Leave me on a bench in Central Park!What do I care?No. I don't want you to do all that. Don't do that.DON'T DO IT!

  • You're the mad one,' I said. 'If you could see yourself, hear your own voice, your music - which of course you play for yourself - you wouldn't see darkness, Nicki. You'd see an illumination that is all your own. Sombre, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns."

  • We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast of the universe; which means endless."

  • I WANT to be a saint. I want to save souls by the millions. I want to do good far and wide. I want to fight evil! I want my life-sized statue in every church. I'm talking six feet tall, blond hair, blue eyes-.Wait a second.Do you know who I am?"

  • Oh, my darling, wish you were here!And my dark soul is happy again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, andbecause the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over thesurface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise."

  • That's the case with most vampires, no matter who says otherwise. Beauty carries us to our doom. Or, to put it more accurately, we are made immortal by those who cannot sever themselves from our charms."

  • 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.

  • One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!

  • I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

  • The fans, the vampire groupies, love the idea of this androgynous, preternatural figure stalking the night, and craving aesthetic pleasure just as he craves blood, wearing only the best velvet clothes, and savoring red roses.

  • 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 NRA disgraced itself this morning with a self-serving press event in which they demonized the media and the entertainment industry for gun violence in America, and advocated a national data base for all mentally ill persons. They apparently want armed guards in all American schools, and it seems, armed volunteers as well. Shocking.

  • I'm always looking, and I'm always asking questions.

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

  • Ignore any loss of nerve, ignore any loss of self-confidence, ignore any doubt or confusion. Move on believing in love, in peace, and harmony, and in great accomplishment. Remember joy isn't a stranger to you. You are winning and you are strong. Love. Love first, love always, love forever.

  • Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music...

  • 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.

  • I gave up on the big screen. The Witching Hour was at Warner Bros. for 10 years and it just didn't work out.

  • I stumble through a carnival of horrors

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

  • Memnoch the Devil happen to be my favorite of all The Vampire Chronicles.

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

  • Locked together in hatred. But I can't hate you Louis. Louis my love, I was mortal till you gave me your immortal kiss. You became my mother, and my father, and so I'm yours forever. But now it's time to end it, Louis. Now it's time to leave him. - Claudia, 'Interview with a Vampire

  • I would die rather than live without you. I would die the same way he died. I can't bear you to look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love me!" -Claudia.

  • Oh, my darling, wish you were here! And my dark soul is happy again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, and because the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over the surface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise.

  • All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.

  • It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

  • Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.

  • Handsome enough' is this Grim Reaper, Who can snuff all these 'brief candles,' every fluttering soul sucking the air, from this hall" -The Vampire Lestat

  • There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.

  • 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.

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

  • I love you still, that's the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!

  • I felt ravaged, and with both hands in a fantasy I reached out for her figure as we ran together through the meadow which belonged only to us and to which these others could never be admitted."Oh, inocent love," she said even as she drank from me, "oh, innocent innocent love."

  • The only power that exists is inside ourselves.

  • I allowed myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat's iridescent eyes, that I'd sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water.

  • In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.

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

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

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

  • His blood coursed through my veins sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestats words made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard his heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.

  • And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Drink from me and live forever. Lestat de Lioncourt

  • Lestat: Toughen up baby. I'm looking for the eternal scum.

  • Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I'm not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We're beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we're merciless killers

  • Lestat: I despise you! I ought to destroy you-finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all.

  • I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.

  • Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.

  • People write to me all the time to tell me that "homosexuality is an abomination." They base this on a quote in Leviticus. I think the Bible has proved to be a very mysterious and dangerous document.

  • as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

  • Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.

  • When you make his sandwiches, put a sexy or loving note in his lunch box.

  • To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

  • I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.-Marius

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

  • Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

  • Don't you see? It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil.

  • Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.

  • 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.

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

  • Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.

  • It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.

  • I was particularly stunned by the casting of [Tom] Cruise, who is no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.

  • How shameful. How predictable! How insipid. And how sweet.

  • He was so rapt in his thoughts that he did not hear anything much that Guido was saying, that lovely bubbling speech of Guido's when he was at last content.Tonio allowed it to pass over him, and now and then he would give a little gracious nod.

  • But in every family there are bad people, and weak people, and some people who can't or won't withstand the trials of life, and who fail spectacularly. Their guardian angels weep; demons beholding them dance for joy.But only The Maker decides what ultimately happens to them.

  • I was no conscious chronicler or witness of the events that unfolded in those times. Surely you understand. You must understand. Do you look thousands of years into the future? Do you measure what's happening to you now by what may matter a thousand years hence? I was stumbling and lurching, groping and from time to time drowning, as any man might.

  • Darkness had been essentially banished from the Earth. It had become a choice.

  • I had to have him, had to. Just the way I had to have everything I wanted; or had to do everything I'd ever wanted to do.

  • What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?

  • Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

  • I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.

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

  • People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

  • I am such a bad girl," she thought. Yet...

  • Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.

  • I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach...

  • What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.

  • New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.

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