Quotes from Anne Rice

Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.

If drugs really numb your consciousness, they'd be a good thing. As it was, they slowed you down, confused you, kept you vulnerable to violent flashes of recall, and then agitated you and made you unsure of what you knew and didn't know.

But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren't there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn't smell the scent of evil; they didn't hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.

Garden of Pain, I need you. What were the songs of beasts to the cries of sentient souls?

But death we are, and death we've always been.

Laura remarked that science was dependent upon poetry, that all scientific description was metaphoric.

Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.

Hoping for something is not the same as expecting it.

I no nothing of god or the devil, and after 400 years... This is the only real evil left...

I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.

And a sad realization drifted through my head, something to do with how young she was, how good she looked in any light, how light didn't make the slightest difference with her. And how old I was, and how all young people, even plain young people, had begun to look beautiful to me.

Hauntings only repeat what occurred once upon a time.

Don't make a religion of reason and logic. Because in the passage of time reason may fail you and when it does, you may find yourself taking refuge in madness.

I'd drink your blood if I could and hook you into every memory inside me, every heartbreak, frame of reference, temporary triumph, petty defeat, mystic moment of surrender.

The old gods will bring about vengeance not so much because they exist but because I once honored them.

Every time I stumbled and fell, something in me hardened, became worse. By the time I reached the castle gates; I think I was not Lestat. I was someone else altogether.

You have to pass away from what failed you into what can sustain you. Otherwise - there is no hope.

I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice.

Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.

No matter how rudely someone treats you, remain kind. Walking away at peace with yourself is worth it.

When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world-its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in to love or to learn, it does not have value. - Zurvan

It was because historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny-and his was, of course, a lie.

That's the glory of it; thousands of years have passed and yet you can follow Him so close!