50 Best Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles Quotes

Louis: So it was, when I'd given up the search for vampires, that a vampire found me.

Lestat: Evil is a point of view. God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.

Lestat: Your body's dying. Pay no attention, it happens to us all.

Louis: 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 terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.

Lestat: [after Claudia kills the piano teacher] Claudia, what have we told you?
Claudia: Never in the house.

Claudia: Locked together in hatred. But I can't hate you, Louis. Louis, my love, I was mortal till you gave me your immortal kiss. You became my mother, and my father, and so I'm yours forever. But now it's time to end it, Louis. Now it's time to leave him.

Lestat: Listen, Louis. There's life in these old hands still. Not quite Furioso. Moderato? Cantabile, perhaps.
Claudia: How can it be?
Lestat: Ask the alligator. His blood helped. Then on a diet of the blood of snakes, toads, and all the putrid life of the Mississippi, slowly, Lestat became something like himself again. Claudia... You've been a very, very, naughty little girl.

Claudia: Which one of you did it? One of you did it! Which on of you made me the way I am?
Lestat: What you are? A vampire gone insane that pollutes its own bed?
Claudia: And if I cut my hair again?
Lestat: It will grow back again.
Claudia: But it wasn't always so. I had a mother once, and Louis, he had a wife. He was mortal the same as she and so was I.
Louis: Claudia!
Claudia: You made us what we are, didn't you?
Lestat: Stop her, Louis.
Claudia: Did you do it to me?
[slashes Lestat's face, and it heals immediately]
Claudia: How did you do it?
Lestat: Why should I tell you? It's in my power.
Claudia: Why yours alone? Tell me how it was done.
Lestat: Be glad I made you what you are. You'd be dead now if I hadn't, just like that damned corpse. Now, get rid of it!
Claudia: You get rid of it.

Louis: But the world was a tomb to me, a graveyard of broken statues, and each of those statues resembled her face.

Lestat: The trick is not to think about it. See that one there? Widow St. Clair. She had the gorgeous young fop murder her husband.
Louis: How do you know?
Lestat: Read her thoughts.
[Louis looks at him inquisitively]
Lestat: *Read* her thoughts.
Louis: [attempts to read her thoughts] I can't.
Lestat: The dark gift is different for each of us. But one thing is true for us all, we grow stronger as we go along. Just take my word for it. She blamed a slave for his murder. Imagine what they did to him. Evildoers are easier, and they taste better.

Louis: You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.
Claudia: And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

[last lines]
Lestat: Don't be afraid... I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Lestat: Lord, what I wouldn't give for a drop of good old-fashioned Creole blood.
Louis: Yankees are not to your taste?
Lestat: Their democratic flavor doesn't suit my palate, Louis.

Louis: Where are we?
Lestat: Where do you think, my idiot friend? We're in a nice, filthy cemetery. Does this make you happy? Is this fitting, proper enough?
Louis: We belong in hell.
Lestat: And what if there is no hell, or they don't want us there? Ever think of that?
Louis: But there was a hell, and no matter where we moved to, I was in it.

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

Lestat: I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Lestat: Don't be afraid. I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Daniel: What about crucifixes?
Louis: Crucifixes?
Daniel: Yes, can you look at them?
Louis: Actually I am quite fond of looking at crucifixes.
Daniel: What about the old stake through the heart?
Louis: Nonsense
Daniel: Coffins? What about coffins?
Louis: Coffins. Coffins, I'm afraid, are a necessity.

Armand: The world changes, we do not, there lies the irony that finally kills us.

Lestat: Claudia... Claudia. Claudia! What have you done?
Claudia: What you told me to do!
Louis: Leave a corpse here to rot?
Claudia: I wanted her. I wanted to be her!

Claudia: Where's mama?
Lestat: Mama... mama has gone to heaven, Chérie, like that sweet lady right there. They all go to heaven.
Louis: All but us.
Lestat: Shh. Do you want to frighten our little daughter?
Claudia: I'm not your daughter.
Lestat: Oh, yes, you are. You're mine and Louis' daughter now. You see, Louis was going to leave us, he was going to go away, but now he's not. Now, he's going to stay and make you happy.
Claudia: Louis.
Louis: You fiend.
Lestat: One happy family.

Louis: Then out of curiosity, boredom, who knows what, I left the old world and came back to my America. And there, a mechanical wonder allowed me to see the sun rise for the first time in two hundred years. And what sunrises, seen as the human eye could never see them: silver at first, then, as the years progressed, in tones of purple, red, and my long lost blue.

Armand: I know nothing of God, or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that will damn or save my soul. And as far as I know, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.

Louis: A little child she was, but also a fierce killer, now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding.

Claudia: Who will take care of me, my love, my dark angel, when you are gone?

[Claudia has just killed her seamstress]
Lestat: Claudia! Claudia! Now who are we going to get to finish your dress? These impracticalities, cherie! Remember: never in the home!

Louis: We reached the Mediterranean. I wanted those waters to be blue, but they were black, nighttime waters, and how I suffered then, straining to recall the color that in my youth I had taken for granted.

Armand: They had forgotten the first lesson, that we are to be powerful, beautiful, and without regret.
Louis: And you can teach me this?
Armand: Yes.
Louis: To be without regret?
Armand: Yes.
Louis: Then what a pair we could make, but what if it's a lesson I don't care to learn?
Armand: What do you mean?
Louis: What if all I have is my suffering, my regret?
Armand: Don't you want to lose it?
Louis: Why? So you can have that too? The heart that mourns her, her that you burnt to a cinder.
Armand: Louis, I swear that I...
Louis: Ah, but I know you did. I know. You, who regrets nothing, you, who feels nothing. If that's all I have left to learn, I can do that on my own.

Lestat: Claudia. You've been a very, very naughty little girl.

Louis: 1791 was the year it happened. I was 24, younger than you are now. But times were different then, I was a man at that age: the master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans. I had lost my wife in childbirth, and she and the infant had been buried less than half a year. I would have been happy to join them. I couldn't bear the pain of their loss. I longed to be released from it. I wanted to lose it all... my wealth, my estate, my sanity. Most of all, I longed for death. I know that now. I invited it. A release from the pain of living. My invitation was open to anyone. To the whore at my side. To the pimp that followed. But it was a vampire that accepted it.

Lestat: Oh Louis, Louis. Still whining, Louis. Have you heard enough? I've had to listen to that for centuries.

Santiago: Suppose death had a heart to love and to release you, to whom would he turn this passion? Would you chose a person from the crowd there? A person to suffer as you suffer?

Louis: Do you think I would let them harm you?
Claudia: No, you would not, Louis. Danger holds you to me.
Louis: Love holds you to me.

Louis: Thirty years had passed, yet her body remained that of an eternal child. Her eyes alone told the story of her age, staring out from under her doll-like curls, with a questioning that will one day need an answer.

Daniel: So there are no vampires in Transylvania? No Count Dracula?
Louis: Fictions, my friend. The vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman.

Louis: 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.

Lestat: No one could resist me, not even you, Louis.
Louis: I tried.
Lestat: [smiling] And the more you tried, the more I wanted you.

Lestat: Mon dieu, what melancholy nonsense. I swear you grow more like Louis each day. Soon you'll be eating rats!
Claudia: Rats? When did you eat rats, Louis?
Louis: It was a long, long time ago. Before you were born, and I don't recommend them.

Louis: Vampires pretending to be humans, pretending to be vampires.
Claudia: How avant-garde.

[to Malloy]
Lestat: I assume I need no introduction.

Daniel: So a vampire can cry.
Louis: Once, maybe twice in his own eternity. Maybe it was to quench those tears forever that I took such revenge on them.

Claudia: Madeleine, Louis is shy.
Madeleine: Drink.
Claudia: Do it, Louis, because I cannot, I haven't the strength. You saw to that when you made me.
Louis: You haven't the vaguest conception under God what you ask.
Madeleine: Au contraire, Monsieur, I have.
Claudia: You have found your new companion, Louis. You will make me mine.

Lestat: Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt.

Louis: How do we seem to you? Do you find us beautiful, magical? Our white skin, our fierce eyes? "Drink", you ask me, do you have any idea of the thing you will become?

Claudia: You... fed on me.
Louis: Yes. And he found me with you, and he cut his wrist and fed you from it, and you were a vampire and have been every night thereafter.
Claudia: You both did it.
Louis: [crying] I took your life... He gave you another one.
Claudia: And here it is, and I hate you both.

Louis: That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became.

Louis: The statue seemed to move, but didn't. The world had changed, yet stayed the same. I was a newborn vampire weeping at the beauty of the night.

Louis: We searched village after village, country after country. And always we found nothing. I began to believe we were the only ones. There was a strange comfort in that thought. For what could the damned really have to say to the damned?

Louis: I'm flesh and blood, but not human. I haven't been human for two hundred years.

Louis: Bear me no ill will, my love, we are now even.
Claudia: What do you mean?
Louis: What died in that room was not that woman. What has died is the last breath in me that was human.
Claudia: Yes, Father. At last we are even.