Anne Rice - Interview with the Vampire (1976)

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I love you still, that's the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!

Anne Rice
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
That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.

Anne Rice
I would die rather than live without you. I would die the same way he died. I can't bear you to look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love me!" -Claudia.

Anne Rice
A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

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

Anne Rice
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
"Good? What are you talking about, 'Good'?"
"That it's good, that it does some good, that there is good in it! Dear God, even if there is no meaning in this world, surely there can still be goodness! It's good to eat, to drink, to laugh, to be together!"

Anne Rice
I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.

Anne Rice
As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us.

Anne Rice
Don't you see? I'm not the spirit of any age. I'm at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged anywhere with anyone at any time!

Anne Rice
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
As if the night had said to me, 'You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms' One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.

Anne Rice
Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there.

Anne Rice
I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.

Anne Rice
And my heart beat faster for the mountains of eastern Europe, finally, beat faster for the one hope that somewhere we might find in that primitive countryside the answer to why under God this suffering was allowed to exist - why under God it was allowed to begin, and how under God it might be ended. I had not the courage to end it, I knew, without that answer.

Anne Rice
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
It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.

Anne Rice
And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.

Anne Rice
I was a twenty-five-year-old man when I became a vampire, and the year was seventeen ninety-one.

Anne Rice
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
I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.

Anne Rice
What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world?

Anne Rice
And then there came the pounding of another drum, as if another giant were coming yards behind him, and each giant, intent on his own drum, gave no notice to the rhythm of the other. The sound grew louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins.

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

Anne Rice
"I see..." said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window.

Anne Rice
It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

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

Anne Rice
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
Who knew that better than I, who had presided over the death of my own body, seeing all I called human wither and die only to form an unbreakable chain which held me fast to this world yet made me forever its exile, a specter with a beating heart?

Anne Rice