Anne Rice Quotations

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

The only pain in pleasure is the pleasure of the pain.

I know nothing of God or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that would damn or save my soul.

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

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

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

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

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

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

Invest in a feather duster - the possibilities are endless.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

I love New Orleans physically. I love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days. I have a beautiful house here.

Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible.

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

My own funeral, I'd like to be laid out in a coffin in my own house. I would like my coffin to be put in the double parlor, and I would like all the flowers to be white.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

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.

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?

I'm going to keep on dealing with the supernatural in a lot of ways.

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.

I can't get very far away from Christianity, I can't get very far away from the angels and the saints. I work them in always, in some way.

I can't keep up with Stephen King's output.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.

I'm usually working on my own mythology, my own realm of created characters. Stories in mythology inspire me, though I may not be conscious of it.

Memnoch the Devil happen to be my favorite of all The Vampire Chronicles.

Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.

I want to love all the children of God - Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist - everyone. I want to love gay Christians and straight Christians.

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.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

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

I do want to go another way - to write something completely different.

There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.

Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.

I gave up on the big screen. The Witching Hour was at Warner Bros. for 10 years and it just didn't work out.

I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

What I did was take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Son of God, the Son of the Virgin Mary, and sought to make Him utterly believable, a vital breathing character.

We need to stop fighting Christian against Christian. I have no time for anything but trying to love other people. That is a full-time job.

The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.

I was obsessed with religious questions, the basics: Why are we here? Why is the world so beautiful?

I wish we had more visible Christian and Catholic leaders who talked about love.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

We have to become saints. We have to become like Christ. Anything less is simply not enough.

When I write something, every word of it is meant. I can't say it enough.

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.

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

But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.

When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.

People write to me all the time to tell me that "homosexuality is an abomination." They base this on a quote in Leviticus. I think the Bible has proved to be a very mysterious and dangerous document.

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.

None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.

Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!

I no longer represent any organized religion. I'm not Catholic. I'm not Christian. I'm saying this because I have to be an outsider for Christ.

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.

The highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world.

Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.

I cannot mislead people into believing that I support organized religion. In Jesus' name, I cannot be complicit with many of the things organized religion does.

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

Evil is just a point of view

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.

I believe in the Biblical documents supporting Jesus. But I have no illusions about them. I think they contain many flaws, scribal errors, and so forth and they are only partial or fragmentary.

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.

I am certain a great many believers and bible readers do believe in social justice.

The human heart is my school.

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.

For me, places have a tremendous impact. I fall in love with places. All of life seems different in different places.

Cities have distinct personalities. It's a matter of knowing it.

Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?... Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?

Don't be a pawn in somebody's game. Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on

It is very disturbing to see people use Christianity and the Bible to support a certain political agenda, especially when one cannot connect that agenda with the authentic teachings of Christ.

I stumble through a carnival of horrors

I like mainly to be invisible, to sort of drift around unseen in the world.

… in the relentless and meaningless manner one searches for something in a nightmare, coming on doors that won’t open or drawers that won’t shut, struggling over and over against the same meaningless thing, not knowing why the effort seems so desperate, why the sudden sight of a chair with a shawl thrown over it inspires the mind with horror.

When we love and want nothing but good for that person, it's one of the greatest gifts we possess.

I love the world the Lord has created; I love the mountains, the rivers, the valleys, the skies. I love the forests, the fields, the flowers. I love the mysteries of evolution and dna and the big bang. I want to know the majesties of the Lord's Creation. I cannot close my eyes to all this. I cannot turn away from science and scientific exploration.

The only power that exists is inside ourselves.

I know Christianity; and I know I have to move away from it and approach Jesus Christ on my own. I have to talk to Him directly and seek His guidance and protection as I seek to make my commitment to Him central to my life.

Making a film, I've learned, can be an exhausting process, due to the need for backing, distribution, etc.

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

I had many wonderful experiences, received beautiful letters, and my Christian books received substantive and thoughtful reviews. But there was always argument, dispute, questions as to what I "really" believed, lectures from here and there on "the real truth," etc.

Motivated employees are crucial to a company's success.

I was influenced by the medieval theological beliefs when I presented Satan in Jesus' dream as unable to figure out who or what Jesus is, and unable to see the future.

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

I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.

If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.

I have to move away from organized religion. The toxic confusion and anger I was feeling in church had become too great.

As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.

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

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.