As a child, I saw this beautiful film, Dracula’s Daughter, and it was with Gloria Holden and was a sequel to the original Dracula. It was all about this beautiful daughter of Dracula who was an artist in London, and she felt drinking blood was a curse. It had beautiful, sensitive scenes in it, and that film mesmerized me. It established to me what vampires were—these elegant, tragic, sensitive people. I was really just going with that feeling when writing Interview With the Vampire. I didn’t do a lot of research.

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

I dreamed of being a great violinist but sadly, I had almost no talent at all musically. So writing was the other great dream.

The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.

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 dangerous enemy indeed.

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 -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on.

Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan's power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God's child, and that we are God's children also. There are no children of Satan, really.

Every moment must be first known and then savored.

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.

How do we seem to you? Do you find us beautiful, magical? Our white skin, our fierce eyes? "Drink" you ask me, do you have any idea of the thing you will become?

ANNE RICE, Interview with the Vampire

My vampires Lestat and Louis and Armand, they look more like angels than the feral Dracula. And they’re not repulsive like Dracula, they’re very seductive and beautiful. To me that added to the drama, to the tragic dilemma of the vampire, that immortality in the form of a vampire gave him so much power, and so many gifts, and so much charm and glamour.

The night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms. One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.

If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.

Vampires have become almost like a genre, like the Western. What I see happening, with writers like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, is the domestication of the vampire. I was more interested in a powerful, Old World figure that had a lot of knowledge, experience, and was surrounded by a lot of glamour and mystery. I wanted to keep the romance. I loved the idea of these people gaining wisdom as they aged, and how that might cause them to be ever more tormented by the fact that they don’t really belong in the world and they prey on human beings, who they’ve really come to appreciate.

In writing, it would help a lot if we had some intermediate punctuation marks to indicate soft questions, soft exclamations, and different inflection in dialogue. But we just don't. And question marks and exclamation marks can jar a reader unnecessarily.

Bisexual is it, how Byronic and charming. Doesn't that double's one's chances for love?

The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable.

Reason was only a created thing, imposed with faith upon the world, and the stars promise nothing to no one.

Why do we so often settle for what makes us devoutly unhappy! Why do we accept that happiness just isn't possible?

ANNE RICE, The Wolves of Midwinter

Treasure the pain; treasure what you have with her, including the fear. Treasure what you may have, including the failure. Treasure it because if we don't live this life, if we don't live it to the fullest year after year and century after century, well, then, we die.

ANNE RICE, The Wolves of Midwinter

You are what you are, not what others would have you be.

ANNE RICE, The Wolves of Midwinter

There is no normal life. There is only life.

ANNE RICE, The Wolves of Midwinter

And another thing too that I noticed in all the werewolf films that I watched—clearly the transformation into a werewolf in particular is a metaphor for adolescence and the sexual transformation of a child. You have a basically neuter-gender person who’s on an equal footing with all other neuter-gender people, and then suddenly adolescence comes and one child turns into a woman, another child turns into a man, both experience sexuality, and sexuality really turns their world upside down. I mean, it certainly did for me as a teenager. It destroyed everything and made possible a whole different life.

You're five hundred years old and you can't use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?

How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.

When a strong man is sweet, even Goddesses look down from Mount Olympus.

We would make our heroes shallow.... We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength.

The vampire does appear in literature right at the time the Reformation is gaining ascendancy, and he certainly does represent the old Catholic Europe. I'm sure my own vampires are seen as embodying the magic of my childhood Catholicism. They have the power of saints. They can work miracles and transcend time.

ANNE RICE, attributed, Anne Rice Reader

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

I felt from the first moment I saw people identifying as “Goth” that what they wanted was romance and beauty, and that they associated with the 19th century and with vampires; I think they craved that, and found their lives rather sterile. They started appearing at my signings in the 1980s wearing beautiful Victorian clothes, old lace, fangs, and white makeup. I think it was born out of a desire to have something beautiful and immutable in their lives. I was delighted!

I can't help being a gorgeous fiend. It's just the card I drew.