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.

an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant.

We are not damned. We never were. Who under the sun has the right to damn any living breathing creature?

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

I love the world the Lord has created; I love the mountains, the rivers, the valleys, the skies. I love the forests, the fields, the flowers. I love the mysteries of evolution and dna and the big bang. I want to know the majesties of the Lord's Creation. I cannot close my eyes to all this. I cannot turn away from science and scientific exploration.

I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil -- religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.

I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.