Anne Rice

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Biography

Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien) is a best-selling American author of gothic, supernatural, historical, erotica, and later religious themed books. Best known for The Vampire Chronicles, her prevailing thematical focus is on love, death, immortality, existentialism, and the human condition. She was married to poet Stan Rice for 41 years until his death in 2002. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.She uses the pseudonym Anne Rampling for adult-themed fiction (i.e., erotica) and A.N. Roquelaure for fiction featuring sexually explicit sado-masochism.

  • Primary profession
  • Writer·producer·actress
  • Country
  • United States
  • Nationality
  • American
  • Gender
  • Female
  • Birth date
  • 04 October 1941
  • Place of birth
  • New Orleans
  • Death date
  • 1784
  • Death age
  • 80
  • Children
  • Christopher Rice
  • Spouses
  • Stan Rice
  • Education
  • University of North Texas·Texas Woman's University·San Francisco State University
  • Knows language
  • English language
  • Parents
  • Henry Rice
  • Influence
  • William Shakespeare·Ernest Hemingway·John Milton·Virginia Woolf·Charles Dickens·

Music

Movies

TV

Books

Trivia

Has claimed in interviews that she fears the dark.

Has pictures of herself giving birth to son, Christopher Rice , on the walls of her New Orleans home.

Suffers from diabetes.

Lives and works in the California desert.

Has written several other novels outside her famous Vampire Chronicles, including the Mayfair Witch trilogy, erotica and historical fiction. However, none of these books has achieved the fame (or sales) of her vampire tales.

Her novel "The Vampire Lestat" is currently being made into a stage production with songs by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Her sister, Alice Borchardt, is also a novelist.

Has a collection of several hundred pairs of black button-up shoes.

Has written under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure.

Chose the pseudonym Anne Rampling, under which she penned her novels "Exit to Eden" and "Belinda," in honour of actress Charlotte Rampling because Anne "admired Charlottes grace."

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 133, pp. 369-377. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

Gave birth to her 1st child at age 24, a daughter Michele Rice on September 21, 1966. Childs father is her now late husband, Stan Rice.

(August 5, 1972) Her only child, a daughter Michele Rice, died from leukemia at the age of 5.

Gave birth to her 2nd child at age 36, a son Christopher Travis Rice (aka Christopher Rice ) on March 11, 1978. Childs father is her now late husband, Stan Rice.

Received a 12,000 dollar advance for "Interview with The Vampire".

Lives in La Jolla, California.

(February 2004) Has currently put her New Orleans home up for sale and is moving to Florida.

Irish-American.

Quotes

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

The vampire is that glittering, dazzling rule-breaker and outsider who,has gained ascendancy over time and place.

Vampires have always been part of our culture. There have always been,superstitions surrounding death and burial in western Europe and the,idea that the dead will come back. When you write a story about good,and evil using a vampire, you are reaching back to the Renaissance for,a figure as powerful as God and the devil. What I love about my readers,is that they really understand what my books are about.

Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.

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.

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

I was good and bad, but never wicked.

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

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

Não importava que Deus no céu fosse católico, protestante ou hindu. O que importava era uma coisa mais profunda, mais antiga e mais forte do que qualquer imagem dessas: um conceito do bem baseado na afirmação da vida, na repulsa à destruição, à perversidade, ao uso e abuso do homem pelo homem. Era a afirmação do humano e do natural.

The Maker offers us creation itself as proof of his greatness.

Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.

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.

I was just walking around saying “We’re all gonna die!” I never got over it. I went to class, I did what I had to do, but I was a gibbering idiot. It never went away. I never again felt the same way about life and death.

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

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

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

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

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.

We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.

I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.

We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless.

But you love books, then,” Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen. “Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive. ”“What a strange thing to say at your age,” she laughed. “No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope —- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.

What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover…,…. it was a brave man’s fear. I knew what he meant. What must a brave general feel when he knows the battle has gone against him and nothing remains but death?,What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.

when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us,I am such a bad girl," she thought. Yet. . .

I think this is a very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from its very beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force its many arguments.

The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.

Who said you had to be human to have a soul? Everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanates from self-conscious. The soul is the expression of self-consciousness. The soul is generated by organized self-consciousness.

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.

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 in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.

If you really want peace in any world you have to learn to say nothing.

And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.

The music as always had a dark sweet luster, but it was more than ever like an endless beginning-a theme ever building to a climax which would never come.

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us. I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.

The human heart is my school.

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 superiority, another shut you out. . . And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!,Three generations before I was the one meant for the necklace. I saw him when I was three years old, so clear and strong that he could slip his warm hand in mine, he could lift me in theair, yes, lift my body, but I refused him. I turned my back on him. I told him, You go back to the hell from which you came. And I used my power to fight him.

It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever.

No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.

And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.

You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness.

But Marchent, most journalists can’t be trusted. You do know that, don’t you?,She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought – that 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 there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Sadness, it was such an arresting emotion. You could almost convince yourself of the rhyme and reason of heartbreak.

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

Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.

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.

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

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.

But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made. It was like dipping a stick into the ocean and trying to write something – all the little people of the world spinning out little patterns that lasted no more than a few years, and meant nothing at all.

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 were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

The only power that exists is inside ourselves.

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

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

I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don’t bother to sell it to another human being. It’s bad business to even consider such a thing.

Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.

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

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

Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil.

The horror was this: the others.

Who could trust language?,Finally those you love are simply . . . those you love.

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.

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars.

Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure.

I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice.

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

And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortal will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.

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

Maybe we do go home, finally.

Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

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

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

Goddamn it, do it yourself. You’re five hundred years old and you can’t use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?,I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.

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.

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 maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

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.

We are the things that others fear," I said. "Remember that.

I watched him rise from the coffin, with slow, elegant gestures; our gestures, for we are the only beings who routinely rise from coffins.

After all, these were blood drinkers, beings who spoke gently, liked poetry, and yet killed mortals all the time.

The sky was growing dangerously light when I left Lestat and made my way to the secret place, below an abandoned building where I kept the iron coffin in which I lie. This is no unusual configuration among our kind-the sad old building, my title to it, or the cellar room cut off from the world above by iron doors no mortal could independently seek to lift.

In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.

I touched the small sacred images. I shook my head and bit my lip, as if to say, How awful that he should have stolen these! But I also found it very funny. And further proof that God had no power over me.

Lestat: I despise you! I ought to destroy you-finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all.

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

Let the flesh instruct the mind.

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.

What lurked beneath my fancy frills, behind my quiet unquestioning eyes? Who was I? Had I no remembrance of a warmer flame than that which gave its wintry glow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed within my quietly moving form~ The Vampire Armand,I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.

Good was above all kind; it was to be gentle. It was to waste nothing. It was to paint, to read, to study, to listen.

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

But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.

I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No. " He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today bullshit?,I was feeling fear. Not a wild, mortal fear, but something cold like a hook in my side.

You are the son of the Lord God! She said. That’s why you can kill and bring back to life, that’s why you can heal a blind man as Joseph saw you do, that’s why you can pray for snow and there will be snow, that’s why you can dispute with your uncle Cleopas when he forgets you’re a boy, that’s why you make sparrows from clay and bring them to life. Keep your power inside you. Guard it until your Father in Heaven shows you the time to use it. If he’s made you a child, then he’s made you a child to grow in wisdom as well as in everything else.

Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.

It seemed at momemts, When I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down to meet the sea and some great secert was to be revealed.

It seemed at moments, when I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down the meet the sea and some great secret was to be revealed.

On writing, my advice is the same to all. 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. — Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. — Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. — Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. — The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.

My Lasher is powerful beyond yourdreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much. ’‘Learned,’ I repeated in amazement. ‘How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they areforever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand thecomplexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this nothappened? How so do you say learned?,It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.

Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight…I might have had that shape!’ Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan was almost Claudia’s name. But Claudia did not hear her. ‘Yes, that shape, I might have known what it was to walk at your side.

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.

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

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 temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

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 there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.

The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others.

I’d like to meet the devil some night,’ he said once with a malignant smile. ‘I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.

When he speaks into your ear so thatno one can hear, he will say he is your slave, that he’s passed to you from Deirdre. But it’s a lie, my dear,a vicious lie. He’ll make you his and drive you mad if you refuse to do his will. That is what he’s done tothem all. ’ She stopped, her wrinkled brows tightening, her eyes drifting off across the dusty surface of thetable. ‘Except for those who were strong enough to rein him in and make him the slave he claimed to be,and use him for their own ends… ’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Their own endless wickedness.

He’ll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He’ll weave a web of deceits so thick you won’t see the world through it. He wants your strength and he’ll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You’re the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he’ll go backto hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don’t you see?He’s created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he hadto do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan!,You think he has no will of his own? You are a fool,Charlotte. Lie with him instead of me!’ I laughed at her, and seeing the pain in her eyes, I laughed more. ‘I should like to see it, you and your daimon. Lie there and call him to come now.

Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, andeducated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in mytwenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruledbefore my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study thisthing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength.

She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing.

Lasher,’ she said, ‘for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees.

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth.

All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.

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.

Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets--as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.

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

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.

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

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