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

Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking...

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...

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding...

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

Her blood coursed through my veins sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestat’s words made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard her heart in that...

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

You’ll sing a song of victory, eternally, though there is none to be had.

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

As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.

I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn’t heartless. She was only aware of things...

The only power that exists is inside ourselves.

In the story of the prince and the frog, there’s always a frog. This story … it has no frog.

It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature – going from...

Motivated employees are crucial to a company’s success.

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.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil… Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets...

…But still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I’ve more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will...

Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.

I don’t think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.

But at that moment I heard Claudia’s voice. She was calling my name. I turned, and, through the tangled vines I saw her distant and tiny, like a white flame on the faint luminescent shell...

. . . as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And...

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...

Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

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...

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...

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

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

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

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.

So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting?

Every moment must be first known and then savored.

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...

You’re a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery.

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

Akasha, for two thousand years I have watched,’ he said. ‘Call me the Roman in the Arena if you will and tell me tales of the ages that went before. When I knelt at your...

Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ?

I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,” she said, “why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire...

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

I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.

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...

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.

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.

Malady of mortality

I was particularly stunned by the casting of [Tom] Cruise, who is no more my Vampire LeStat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.

What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world?

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.

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...

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