Anne rice quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Ignore any loss of nerve, ignore any loss of self-confidence, ignore any doubt or confusion. Move on believing in love, in peace, and harmony, and in great accomplishment. Remember joy isn't a stranger to you. You are winning and you are strong. Love. Love first, love always, love forever.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

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.

And when a strong man is sweet, even Goddesses look down from Mount Olympus.

I stumble through a carnival of horrors

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.

Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.

I left Christianity because I wanted to be a moral person. That is why I left. I no longer believed in its lies.

It's not so," I said. "And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?

We're frightened of what makes us different.

I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning...rather than one great dull answer to all our questions

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.

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

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

There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.

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.

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

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

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.

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.

In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity.

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.

Let the flesh instruct the mind.

Evil is just a point of view

It's so easy to persecute an older, overweight, unwise, crude, ignorant woman who may very well be a good person at heart who has achieved a great deal in her life. So easy to vilify her and hate her and try to destroy her life. Woe to anyone today who is not slender, young, clever and politically correct.

Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.

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

The only power that exists is inside ourselves.

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

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

You were the vampire in my dream. My perfect one.

Anger is too pathetic. Anger is as weak as fear.

A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.

Lestat: Toughen up baby. I'm looking for the eternal scum.

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.

In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?

Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.

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.

Motivated employees are crucial to a company's success.

Don't you see? It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil.

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.

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

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.

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.

Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of devils wing you to your rest.

Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.

The human heart is my school.

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 know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

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.

Sleep is your friend. Dreams are your unwelcome guests.

I resolved to move just a little bit more slowly through the world, to look around myself with greater care, and to try to remain conscious of all that was going on around me at all times.

Pride is the parent of destruction; pride eats the mind and the heart and the soul alive.

Everything we do in life, we do with certain expectations.

Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music.

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.

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

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

My greatest sin has always been that I have a wonderful time being myself

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

Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.

His Back was turned to the end of the world and the end of the world was quiet.

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.

The earth here is beautiful. And it still belongs to the dead.

The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

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

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.

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.

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

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

The NRA disgraced itself this morning with a self-serving press event in which they demonized the media and the entertainment industry for gun violence in America, and advocated a national data base for all mentally ill persons. They apparently want armed guards in all American schools, and it seems, armed volunteers as well. Shocking.

I find at moments I'm as fragile as glass.

Keep your secrets Keep your silence It is a better gift than truth

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

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.

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

I don't believe in hell. The idea that a supreme being would make hell is ridiculous. An eternity of pain that results in no learning, reformation or rebirth is a nauseating idea. It's one of the reasons I left Christianity. I simply could not accept that version of God.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I think love can save the world. When we love, we completely recognize the value of the other.

The fact that I loved you was the greatest lie I have ever lived.

I think to feel this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.

In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.

Protect your voice and your vision. If going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don’t do it. … Do what gets you to write and not what blocks you. … Don’t take any guff off anybody.

What if I could give you your life back; pluck out the pain; and give you a world of unimaginable beauty that would be for all time.

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.

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

No matter how rudely someone treats you, remain kind. Walking away at peace with yourself is worth it.

I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.

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.

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.

Your love to others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came over me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image - it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural.

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

Remember always, he said, that nothing is as precious to us as the magnificent gift of life. Let the moon and the stars always remind you of this-that though we are tiny creatures in this universe, we are filled with life.

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

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.

I am afraid of death. I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give my life.

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

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

Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.

I don't believe in anything and that makes me stronger than you think

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.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.

Every moment must be first known and then savored.

I love the one who punishes me well.

I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.

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.

Believe in angels? Then believe in vampires. Believe in me. There are worse things on earth.

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

One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world.

I was good and bad, but never wicked.

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.

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