Anne Rice

We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.

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.

Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.

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

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.

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

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. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.

It was as if I had only just been able to see colours and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time.

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.

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.

We're frightened of what makes us different.

I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.

Malady of mortality

As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.

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