"It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course."

"I watched him rise from the coffin, with slow, elegant gestures; our gestures, for we are the only beings who routinely rise from coffins."

"How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me yourself about the world? Don't you see, everybody hates God now. It's not that God is dead in the twentieth century. It's that everybody hates Him! At least I think so."

"Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil."

"To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself."

"But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters."

"He'll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He'll weave a web of deceits so thick you won't see the world through it. He wants your strength and he'll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You're the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he'll go backto hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don't you see?He's created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he hadto do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan!"

"I was just walking around saying "We're all gonna die! I never got over it. I went to class, I did what I had to do, but I was a gibbering idiot. It never went away. I never again felt the same way about life and death."

"It is tragic that many in America think of us - Christians - as being people who hate others."

"Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ASK. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds."

"As I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive."

"The whole theme of Interview with the Vampire was Louis's quest for meaning in a godless world. He searched to find the oldest existing immortal simply to ask, What is the meaning of what we are?"

"As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that."

"I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source."

"Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source."(...)"But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen."Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive.""What a thing to say at your age", she laughed."No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "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."

"Information age. I guess I'm part of it, even if I can't remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can't retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use."

"We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky " such brutal beauty is beyond dispute."

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

"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."

"A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor."

"Who said you had to be human to have a soul? Everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanates from self-conscious. The soul is the expression of self-consciousness. The soul is generated by organized self-consciousness."

"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. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value."

"Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me."

"You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't."

"And do stop trying to determine if I am a man or a woman. The fact is I'm a good part both and therefore neither one. I was just explaining to your Aunt Queen. I was born endowed with the finest traits of both sexes and I drift this way and that as I choose."

"One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!"

"I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don't bother to sell it to another human being. It's bad business to even consider such a thing."

"You're the hunter, the warrior. You're stronger than anyone else here, that's your tragedy."

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

"The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that, and maybe sleeping beauty's dead."

"I didn't want to be in hell, even for a moment. I sure as hell wasn't going there just to spit in the face of the Prince of Darkness, whoever he might be!On the contrary, if I was a damned thing, then let the son of a bitch come for me! Let him tell me why I was mean to suffer. I would truly like to know.As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that."

""I don't believe in anything, Mother," I said. "You told Armand long ago that you believe you'll find answers in the great jungles and forests; that the stars will finally reveal a vast truth. But I don't believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think"."

"To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us."

"The human heart is my school."

"Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them."

"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."

"Darkness had been essentially banished from the Earth. It had become a choice."

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

"I touched the small sacred images. I shook my head and bit my lip, as if to say, How awful that he should have stolen these! But I also found it very funny. And further proof that God had no power over me."

"To die or not to die, that is the question; it is nobler to live in torment and rage than not to live at all?"

"Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create."

"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."

"You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well."

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

"Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything."

"What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?"

"Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another."

"What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not."

"But there is no value to suffering!"

"You think he has no will of his own? You are a fool,Charlotte. Lie with him instead of me!' I laughed at her, and seeing the pain in her eyes, I laughed more.'I should like to see it, you and your daimon. Lie there and call him to come now."