The Vampire Chronicles Collection: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned

by Anne Rice

He would leave such ruin and death behind him no one could make a story of that night at Pointe du Lac,

Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.

all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.”

The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality.

You … alone … under the rising moon … can strike like the hand of God!’

for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.

whispering in her tiny seashell ear

Yet I have your tongue. Your passion for the truth. Your need to drive the needle of the mind right to the heart of it all,

I remembered now that I had passed here once when the windows were ablaze and the sound of singing poured out into Jackson Square. I had hesitated then, wondering if there were some secret Lestat had never told me, something which might destroy me were I to enter. I’d felt compelled to enter, but I had pushed this out of my mind, breaking loose from the fascination of the open doors, the throng of people making one voice.

I am not mortal, father, but immortal and damned, like angels put in hell by God. I am a vampire.’

‘Young man, do you fear God at all?

And the vampire lunged at me, that strangled cry rising again as the stench of fetid breath rose in my nostrils and the clawlike fingers cut into the very fur of my cape.

And I realized, through my frantic sobbing breaths, what it was I held in my arms.

I was battling a mindless, animated corpse. But no more.

The door to the secrets of eastern Europe was shut against us.

AND THAT WAS HOW it was throughout Transylvania and Hungary and Bulgaria, and through all those countries where the peasants know that the living dead walk, and the legends of the vampires abound. In every village where we did encounter the vampire, it was the same.” “A mindless corpse?” the boy asked. “Always,” said the vampire.

But the main thing which I had then was despair. And in despair the recurring fear that we had killed the only other vampire like us, Lestat.

In the dark nights of eastern Europe, Lestat was the only vampire I’d found.

Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague—and the damp of the Louisiana climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone façade, so that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination of her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious, though unconscious, collective will.

That the vampires of the world are a small number and live in terror of strife amongst themselves and choose their fledglings with great care, making certain that they respect the other vampires mightily.

When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion.

‘I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death,’ I said. ‘It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong. You can only have the desperate confusion and longing and the chasing of phantom goodness in its human form.

And yet I would not accept it, could not accept it, because like all creatures I don’t wish to die! And so I sought for other vampires, for God, for the devil, for a hundred things under a hundred names.

But you were a destroyer just as I was a destroyer,

Always I’d felt that I couldn’t be a good human being and fight them. To be good meant to be defeated by them. Unless of course I found a more interesting idea of goodness.

Only the impossible can do the impossible.”

“But no one values anything anymore. Fashion is everything. Even atheism is a fashion.”

his long mouth opening wide so that again I saw the small white fangs. They were the only teeth he possessed.

But how could a monster feel joy?

A great horde of jangling skeletons snared in flesh and rags,

frantic to get me to the nearby hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu.

A thousand other things can be said about the world, but only aesthetic principles can be verified, and these things alone remain the same.

What right have I to intervene in what the centuries have in store for you?”

If loving mortals is the hell you speak of, I am already in it.

mortals will accept almost any “natural explanation” offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.)

Any man can kill another man!

And what did you do with it but use your Satanic powers to simulate the actions of a good man!”

You fell under the spell of one and then the other. What you suffer now is the absence of a spell.

Was it spiritual or was it voluptuous? Was the angel painted on the triptych caught in the material, or was the material transformed?”

“All I learned from Armand, finally, was that immortals find death seductive and ultimately irresistible, that they fail to conquer death or humanity in their minds.

“I was a good marksman when I was a young man,” I said, “a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word ‘good.’

But civilization has at last created men who behave innocently. For the first time they look about themselves and say, ‘What the hell is all this!’ ”

in the Savage Garden, where no law prevailed except the law of the garden, which was the aesthetic law. That the crops shall grow high, that the wheat shall be green and then yellow, that the sun shall shine.

“Lestat, in eternity, covens are actually rare. Most vampires are distrustful and solitary beings and they do not love others. They have no more than one or two well-chosen companions from time to time, and they guard their hunting grounds and their privacy as I do mine.

We live in a world of accidents finally, in which only aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever,

If the mind can find no meaning, then the senses give

And what is an angel but a ghost in drag?

All manner of disasters, inventions, and medical miracles weighed down upon the mind of the ordinary man.

Terms abounded, but there was no rigid vocabulary.

Think on the mortals you should weep for. Envision those who have suffered through the long dreary centuries—the victims of famine and deprivation and ceaseless violence. Victims of endless injustice and endless battling. How then can you weep for a race of monsters, who without guidance or purpose played the devil’s gambit on every mortal they chanced to meet!”