Quotes from Anne Rice

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 know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

Let the flesh instruct the mind.

I know nothing of god or the devil. I have never learned a secret nor found a cure that would damn or save my soul.

I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.

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.

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 never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over any lips, my hands!

If I haven't put that on a T-shirt, I'm going to. Actually, I really don't want to write anything that can't be put on a T-shirt. Actually I'd like to write only on T-shirts. Actually, I'd like to write whole novels on T-shirts. So you guys could say, 'I'm wearing chapter 8 of Lestat's new book, that's my favorite; oh I see you're wearing chapter 6-

Don't be a pawn in somebody's game. Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on

We shall live even in this state of living death, we shall love, we shall feel, we shall defy all who would judge and destroy us.

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.

There are so many books I mean to read, and things I mean to see.

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

Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, "Ah, you are my friend, how I love you," things like that to each other?...it was a matter of a concept of evil, wasn't it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation.

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.

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.

The supernatural world has always been more real to me than the real world.

Revenge is the concern of those who are at some point or other beaten. I am not beaten, I told myself. No, not beaten. And victory is far more interesting to contemplate than revenge.

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.

I'd thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she'd surpassed all the language I had for it.

I think to feel this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.

Sometimes fear is a warning. It's like someone putting a hand on your shoulder and saying Go No Farther.

A starving child is a frightful sight. A starving vampire, even worse.