Interview with the Vampire Quotes

“You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Because no one could in any guise convince me of what I myself knew to be true, that I was damned in my own mind and soul.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I understand, I am just beginning, I am just beginning to understand”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“That passivity in me has been the core of it all, the real evil. That weakness, that refusal to compromise a fractured and stupid morality, that awful pride! For that, I let myself become the thing I am, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I let Claudia become the vampire she became, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I stood by and let her kill Lestat, when I knew that was wrong, the very thing that was her undoing. I lifted not a finger to prevent it. And Madeleine, Madeleine, I let her come to that, when I should never have made her a creature like ourselves. I knew that was wrong! Well, I tell you I am no longer that passive, weak creature that has spun evil from evil till the web is vast and thick while I remain its stultified victim. It's over!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
― Anne Rice , Interview with the 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”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“This evil, this concept, it comes from disappointment, from bitterness! Don't you see? Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses you, so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power that exists is inside ourselves? How could you believe in these old fantastical lies, these myths, these emblems of the supernatural?”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Put out the light and then put out the light.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And time would open up to us and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same. But you're dead inside to me, you're cold and beyond reach!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“He sneered with the impatience of people listening to the obvious lies of others.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Yes.’ He drank it all down and then casually threw the glass at the fireplace. I stared at the fragments. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ He gestured to the broken glass with a sarcastic smile. ‘I surely hope you don’t, because there’s nothing much you can do about it if you do mind.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“They reflect the age in cynicism which cannot comprehend the death of possibilities, fatuous sophisticated indulgence in the parody of the miraculous, decadence whose last refuge is self-ridicule, a mannered helplessness. You saw them; you've known them all your life. You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“...But still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I've more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. Yet the name Paris makes me feel it.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I’d like to meet the devil some night,’ he said once with a malignant smile. ‘I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Killing is no ordinary act,' said the vampire. 'One doesn't simply glut oneself on blood.' He shook his head. 'It is the experience of another's life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that life through the blood, slowly. It is again and again the experience when I sucked the blood from Lestat's wrist and felt his heart pound with my heart. It is again and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires that is the ultimate experience.”
― anne rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I wanted none of it finally. And, deserving nothing better, I closed up like a spider in the flame of a match. And even Armand who was my constant companion, and my only companion, existed at a great distance from me, beyond that veil which separated me from all living things, a veil which was a form of shroud.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“i wondered vaguely what it would be to feel this loss, this outrage, and be justified in it, be deserving of sympathy, of solace. I would not have told my woe to a living creature. My own tears meant nothing to me.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I no nothing of god or the devil, and after 400 years... This is the only real evil left...”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; 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.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“It was as if I had only just been able to see colours and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“But Paris, Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets—as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her—and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I can't tell you exactly, any more than I could tell you exactly what is
the experience of sex if you have never had it.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“You really have need of very little, but each of us must decide how much he wants.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And what truly lies before you is vampire nature, which is killing. For I guarantee you that if you walk the streets tonight and strike down a woman as rich and beautiful as Babette and suck her blood until she drops at your feet you will have no hunger left for Babette's profile in the candlelight or for listening by the window for the sound of her voice. You will be filled, Louis, as you were meant to be, with all the life that you can hold; and you will have hunger when that's gone for the same, and the same, and the same. The red in this glass will be just as red; the roses on the wallpaper just as delicately drawn. And you'll see the moon the same way, and the same the flicker of a candle. And with that same sensibility that you cherish you will see death in all its beauty, life as it is only known on the very point of death. Don't you understand that, Louis? You alone of all creatures can see death that way with impunity. You...alone...under the rising moon...can strike like the hand of God!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“It’s hard to imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Interview with the Vampire.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“... from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire