Vampire Chronicles 1: Interview with the vampire

Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind of the artist. The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality. But often this isn’t understood; and here comes the waste, the tragedy.

Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

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.

“You must understand that what I felt for Babette now was a desire for communication, stronger than any other desire I then felt…except for the physical desire for…blood. It was so strong in me, this desire, that it made me feel the depth of my capacity for loneliness. When I’d spoken to her before, there had been a brief but direct communication which was as simple and as satisfying as taking a person’s hand.

‘You’re from the devil. You were from the devil when you came to me!’

I hated him and wanted to leave him; yet could I leave him?

“But aren’t angels capable of love?” asked the vampire. “Don’t angels gaze upon the face of God with complete love?”

They were very black and totally foreign; they spoke in their African tongues, and they spoke the French patois; and when they sang, they sang African songs which made the fields exotic and strange

“No. Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, that he appreciated nothing.

A young man around your age would have appealed to him in particular.”