Top 425 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Rice

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I broke with my religion in college.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Invest in a feather duster - the possibilities are endless.

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.

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

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

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

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

We're frightened of what makes us different.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.

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