Anne Rice > Quotes

“Revenge is the concern of those who are at some point or other beaten. I am not beaten, I told myself. No, not beaten. And victory is far more interesting to contemplate than revenge.”
― Anne Rice, The Tale of the Body Thief

“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, Interview with the Vampire

“I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on every thing said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse -- the things which often make dialogue impossible.
And after a long interval he said, 'I want you. I want you more than anything in the world.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“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, Interview with the Vampire

“A starving child is a frightful sight. A starving vampire, even worse.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Sometimes fear is a warning. It's like someone putting a hand on your shoulder and saying Go No Farther.”
― Anne Rice, Memnoch the Devil

“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, The Vampire Lestat

“Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.”
― Anne Rice, Memnoch the Devil

“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

“I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“On writing, my advice is the same to all. 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. --- Ignore
critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. ---- Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you. Do it your own way.
--- Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. --- The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.”
― Anne Rice

“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, Interview with the Vampire

“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, Memnoch the Devil

“I don't like myself you know. I love myself. I'm devoted to myself till my dying day. But I don't like myself.”
― Anne Rice

“You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.
And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“We can't stand it, to be alone. We cannot bear it, any more than the monks of old could bear it, men who though they had renounced all else for Christ's sake, nevertheless came together in congregations to be with one another, even as they enforced upon themselves the harsh rules of single solitary cells and unbroken silence. They couldn't bear to be alone.

We are too much men and women; we are yet formed in the image of the Creater, and what can we say of Him with any certainty except that He, whoever He may be--Christ, Yahweh, Allah--He made us, did He not, because even He in His Infinite Perfection could not bear to be alone.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us”
― Anne Rice, The Mummy

“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, Interview with the Vampire

“A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.”
― Anne Rice

“One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world.”
― Anne Rice, The Tale of the Body Thief

“I assume I don't need an introduction.”
― Anne Rice

“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, Interview with the Vampire

“It's so easy to wish for death when nothing's wrong with you! It's so easy to fall in love with death, and I've been all my life, and seen it's most faithful worshippers crumble in the end, screaming just to live, as if all the dark veils and the lillies and the smell of candles, and grandiose promises of the grave meant nothing. I knew that. But I always wished I was dead. It was a way to go on living”
― Anne Rice

“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“The human heart is my school.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others.”
― Anne Rice, Servant of the Bones

“Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ?”
― Anne Rice, Merrick

“So until we meet again, I am thinking of you always; I love you; I wish you were here...in my arms.”
― Anne Rice

“The earth here is beautiful. And it still belongs to the dead.”
― Anne Rice