"But Marchent, most journalists can't be trusted. You do know that, don't you?"

"Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell."

"Sadness, it was such an arresting emotion. You could almost convince yourself of the rhyme and reason of heartbreak."

"All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk."

"Who has a right to tell me I have no gift, no talent, no passion ...' he murmured. 'Why do people say those things to you when youre young? Doesn't seem fair, does it?''No, darling, it's not fair,'she said. 'But the mystery is why you listen."

"She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing."

"Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind."

"If goodness does exist, then I'm the opposite of it. I'm evil, and I revel in it."

"What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover."

"The sky was growing dangerously light when I left Lestat and made my way to the secret place, below an abandoned building where I kept the iron coffin in which I lie.This is no unusual configuration among our kind-the sad old building, my title to it, or the cellar room cut off from the world above by iron doors no mortal could independently seek to lift."

"But you love books, then, Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen."Oh, yes, Lestat said. "Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive."What a strange 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 new universe, one is saved."

"We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless."

"I am the Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal more or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not."

"Resignation requires will, and will requires decision, and decision requires belief, and belief requires that there is something to believe in!"

"I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice."

"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."

"When you make his sandwiches, put a sexy or loving note in his lunch box."

"Don't be a fool for the Devil, darling."

"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."

"I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue."

"I think this is a very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from its very beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force its many arguments."

"Three generations before I was the one meant for the necklace. I saw him when I was three years old, so clear and strong that he could slip his warm hand in mine, he could lift me in theair, yes, lift my body, but I refused him. I turned my back on him. I told him, You go back to the hell from which you came. And I used my power to fight him."

"The horror was this: the others."

"You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal nature. You've given it up. You no longer look "through a glass darkly." But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth with your new eyes."

"Lestat: I despise you! I ought to destroy you-finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all."

"I was good and bad, but never wicked."

"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."

"I'm always looking, and I'm always asking questions."

"Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn't the whole issue. Vanity must wait."

"Because if God doesn't exist we are the creaturesof highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand thepassage of time and the value off every minute of human life. Andwhat constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after oreventually . . . it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, this life . . . every second of it . . . is all we have."

"To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner."

"It seemed at momemts, When I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down to meet the sea and some great secert was to be revealed."

"You, know, the only thing I can be is a writer. I'm absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you've lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you."

"But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made. It was like dipping a stick into the ocean and trying to write something " all the little people of the world spinning out little patterns that lasted no more than a few years, and meant nothing at all."

"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."

"It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I'd envision his face."

"New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people."

"I can't help being a gorgeous fiend. It's just the card I drew."

"And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness."

"When he speaks into your ear so thatno one can hear, he will say he is your slave, that he's passed to you from Deirdre. But it's a lie, my dear,a vicious lie. He'll make you his and drive you mad if you refuse to do his will. That is what he's done tothem all.' She stopped, her wrinkled brows tightening, her eyes drifting off across the dusty surface of thetable. 'Except for those who were strong enough to rein him in and make him the slave he claimed to be,and use him for their own ends. ' Her voice trailed off. 'Their own endless wickedness."

"I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces."

"And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world."

"It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever."

"Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You."

"Goddamn it, do it yourself. You're five hundred years old and you can't use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?"

"I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over any lips, my hands!"

"Invest in a feather duster - the possibilities are endless."

"We are the things that others fear," I said. "Remember that."