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.

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

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.

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.

My last sunrise. That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely; yet I do not think I remember any other sunrise before it.

… in the relentless and meaningless manner one searches for something in a nightmare, coming on doors that won’t open or drawers that won’t shut, struggling over and over against the same meaningless thing, not knowing why the effort seems so desperate, why the sudden sight of a chair with a shawl thrown over it inspires the mind with horror.

I grabbed her ankle and kissed it, and when I looked up I saw her chin and her eyelashes as she threw back her head and laughed.