There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.

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

God, why didn't you make us all dogs?

I am the Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal more or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.

Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.

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.

As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.