Anne Rice famous quotes

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

#Perspective #Perception #Different

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

#Changes Over Time

And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.
-- Anne Rice

#Self #Long #Doubt

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Book #Men #Giving

The only power that exists is inside ourselves.
-- Anne Rice

#Powerful #Inspiring Writing

Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.
-- Anne Rice

#Halloween #Might #Hell

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

#Perfect #Devil #Feels

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Writing #Creative #Juice

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Writing #Ghouls #Years

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.
-- Anne Rice

#Temptation #Sin

I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning...rather than one great dull answer to all our questions
-- Anne Rice

#Heaven #Library #Dull

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.
-- Anne Rice

#Inspirational #Life #Writing

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Grief #Mean #Eye

Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?... Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?
-- Anne Rice

#Mean #Names

I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.
-- Anne Rice

#Children #Home #Devil

Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing...but Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise.
-- Anne Rice

#Heart #Paris #Promise

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Happiness #Laughter #Perfect

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.
-- Anne Rice

#Pain #Pleasure

I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.
-- Anne Rice

#Vampire #Cards #Helping

In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?
-- Anne Rice

#Depth #Hell #Demon

Protect your voice and your vision. If going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don’t do it. … Do what gets you to write and not what blocks you. … Don’t take any guff off anybody.
-- Anne Rice

#Block #Reading #Writing

Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.
-- Anne Rice

#Selfish #Heaven #Soul

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Angel #Saint #Literature

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

#Beautiful #Religious #World

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Christian #Mother #Osiris

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
-- Anne Rice

#Reality #Evil #Literature

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

#Too Much #Enough

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

#Children #Sight #Vampire

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Book #Fall #Might

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
-- Anne Rice

#Writing #Risk #Literature

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Character #Principles #Catharsis

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

#Hunting #New Orleans #Vampire

Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.
-- Anne Rice

#Strong Women #Strong #Unpredictable

It's not so," I said. "And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?
-- Anne Rice

#Thinking #Long #Touching

And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.
-- Anne Rice

#Real #Men #Evil

The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.
-- Anne Rice

#Change #Lying #World

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.
-- Anne Rice

#Night #Thinking #Voice

Believe in angels? Then believe in vampires. Believe in me. There are worse things on earth.
-- Anne Rice

#Believe #Angel #Vampire

The human heart is my school.
-- Anne Rice

#Heart #School #Human Heart

Evil is just a point of view
-- Anne Rice

#Views #Evil #Point Of View

The highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world.
-- Anne Rice

#World #Natural #Persons

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Simple #Giving #Optimism

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Hurt #Sorry #School

Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.
-- Anne Rice

#Voice #Long #Profound

I stumble through a carnival of horrors
-- Anne Rice

#Horror #Lestat #Carnivals

Anger is too pathetic. Anger is as weak as fear.
-- Anne Rice

#Weak #Pathetic

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

#Flower #Fall #Hatred

When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.
-- Anne Rice

#Real #Fall #Mean

Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.
-- Anne Rice

#Sorry #Thinking #People

I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.
-- Anne Rice

#Night #Vampire #Newborn

Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind.
-- Anne Rice

#Choices #Be Kind #Kind

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

#Giving #Suffering #Our Words

Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.
-- Anne Rice

#Lying #Believe #Purpose

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Sleep #Mystery #Horror

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Daughter #Mother #Pain

We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.
-- Anne Rice

#Light #Moments #Breathe

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

#Angel #Wings #Black

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Christian #Gay #Names

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Purpose #World #Bears

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Sweet #Spring #Home

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
-- Anne Rice

#Needs #Mediocrity #Literature

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Children #Believe #Vampire

The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.
-- Anne Rice

#Sleep #Despair #Sleeping Beauty

I think any supernatural hero today, whether he's a vampire, werewolf, a resuscitated mummy, whatever he is, is going to have to deal with the fact that scientists are going to want to catch him and study him. His big enemy is not going to be Dr. Van Helsing today, it's going to be the doctor who wants to put him in a lab and get his blood for what it can do to cure disease or grant immortality.
-- Anne Rice

#Hero #Thinking #Doctors

Say what you will to the force that governs the universe. Perhaps we'll call it into being, and it will yet love us as we love it.
-- Anne Rice

#Force #Universe

...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.
-- Anne Rice

#Moon #Remember #Werewolf

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.
-- Anne Rice

#Mean #Kids #College

I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.
-- Anne Rice

#Writing #Lord

Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.
-- Anne Rice

#Heart #Dust #Sorrow

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.
-- Anne Rice

#Listening #Diving #Facts

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.
-- Anne Rice

#Lying #Long #Endure

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.
-- Anne Rice

#Might #Way

I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.
-- Anne Rice

#Meaningful #Writing #Thinking

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Beautiful #Daughter #Children

Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.
-- Anne Rice

#Men #Names #Giving

To learn and to love, that is what we are here for, any activity which is not grounded in one of these two is a waste of time.
-- Anne Rice

#Two #Waste #Wasting Time

Who knows what the hell a government is or what the hell a government does.
-- Anne Rice

#Government #Doe #Hell

This suffering, this unspeakable capacity to bleed and to know pain and to know annihilation, is what has to be overcome in this world if anyone is to reach God.
-- Anne Rice

#Pain #Suffering #Overcoming

There was no point in waiting until the next world. You had to do everything now, every kind of sin.
-- Anne Rice

#Waiting #World #Next

And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit.
-- Anne Rice

#Lonely #Heart #Broken

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel every particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share."---Forward to Kafka's Short stories
-- Anne Rice

#Fashion #Water #Soul

Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!
-- Anne Rice

#Vampire #Avant Garde #Pretending

I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.
-- Anne Rice

#Song #Listening #Favorite Song

You make me miserable. You really do, I want you to know that. Much as I love you, much as I need you, much as I can't exist without you, you make me miserable.
-- Anne Rice

#Love You #Needs #Want

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Soul #Vampire #Church

Vampires always order hot drinks. They aren't going to drink them; but they can feel the warmth and smell them if they're hot, and that is so good.
-- Anne Rice

#Order #Smell #Vampire

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.
-- Anne Rice

#Dream #Reality #Mad

Lestat: Toughen up baby. I'm looking for the eternal scum.
-- Anne Rice

#Baby #Scum #Lestat

You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me, Mother. I'm too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all
-- Anne Rice

#Mother #Strong #Loneliness

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
-- Anne Rice

#Beautiful #Angel #Snakes

Evil is a point of view.
-- Anne Rice

#Views #Evil #Point Of View

Suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls.
-- Anne Rice

#Soul #Suffering #Growth

And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortal will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.
-- Anne Rice

#Water #House #Mind

... what I fear in writing is the safe decision.
-- Anne Rice

#Writing #Decision #Safe

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.
-- Anne Rice

#Heart #Blood #Veins

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
-- Anne Rice

#Mother #Father #Hate

In these last few days, we were close because we were both mortal men. We saw the same sun and the same twilight, we felt the same pull of the earth beneath our feet. We drank together and broke bread together. We might have made love together, if you had only allowed such a thing. But that’s all changed. You have your youth, yes, and all the dizzying wonder that accompanies the miracle. But I still see death when I look at you. I know now I cannot be your companion, and you cannot be mine
-- Anne Rice

#Twilight #Men #Feet

You look good to me, you damnable little devil, good to embrace and good to love.
-- Anne Rice

#Devil #Looks #Littles

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

#World #Diplomats #Nuance

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

#Atheist #Cocky #Years