- Lestat de Lioncourt: Oh, it's you who lost, Claudia, for the many hundredth time. I admire your steadfast pursuit of a game you clearly have no acumen for.
- Claudia: My massa taught me how to play, but only enough to occupy his time.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: In many ways, they were more like each other than they wanted to admit. They both sought out weakness.They reveled in the exploitation of it, and they romped with joy as I played audience to their joyless exchange
- Lestat de Lioncourt: I played three games at once in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and one of my opponents was Johannes Zukertort,
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Are we the sum of our worst moments? Can we be forgiven if we do not forgive others ourselves?
- Lestat de Lioncourt: She's an affected, self-absorbed, nasty little creature who's fooled herself into thinking she's smarter than she is and she is poisoning Louis against me.
- Antoinette: You don't need her and you don't need him. They don't appreciate you like I do.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: I have given her so many gifts, so many incalculable gifts. And you're right, it is *both* of them. He broods. She snipes. That's why I need you. You fortify me against them.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Louis, I don't know what possessed me that night.
- Claudia: Three years ago. That night three years ago, he means.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: I was someone I don't want to be anymore. I've changed. Let me prove it to you. I'm nothing without you. I'm nothing without both of you. If you want me to go away, just say so. I'll obey you. I'll leave your life forever.
- [Louis doesn't answer]
- Lestat de Lioncourt: This silence is cruel. And you were never cruel, Louis.
- Claudia: Let me go, Lestat.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: In Louis' hour of need? I'm afraid I can't allow that. He's very fragile right now. Worse than the last time you abandoned him, when you filled your head with knowledge and hitched a ride on a motorbike.
- Claudia: He picked you over me.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Louis couldn't pick an apple off a tree in his current state.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Claudia... you left, without saying goodbye. Again. I'm sure it was an oversight, but still. You'd think your creator had earned the courtesy.
- Claudia: You didn't want me. You made me for Louis.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: And he needs you now more than ever. He's in a terrible state.
- Claudia: He said I could go. He picked you over me.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Louis couldn't pick an apple off a tree in his current state. He'd grip it, tug at it, then, weak as he is, the stem would hold.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Is your medicine taking?
- Daniel Molloy: It's cold and itchy. Thanks for asking.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Are you still dreaming about our first meeting, Daniel?
- Daniel Molloy: I keep waking up just before you ask me back to your shitty apartment.
- Daniel Molloy: Hey, Doc, did you know there's a flying vampire apocalypse coming your way?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Most vampires do not possess the Cloud Gift. With few exceptions, only the most ancient of us have it.
- Daniel Molloy: You know he's a vampire, right?
- Dr. Fareed Bhansali: I do not discuss my patients with anyone but the patients themselves.
- Daniel Molloy: [to the recorder] That's the voice of Dr. Fareer Bhansali...
- Dr. Fareed Bhansali: That is not my voice.
- Daniel Molloy: ...He's the personal physician to the deputy prime minister and...
- Dr. Fareed Bhansali: And I am not here.
- Daniel Molloy: ...the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac.
- Rashid: He's officially off the record.
- Daniel Molloy: NDAs signed by any and all who cross the threshold, eh?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: For six years in all, these raw and desperate mea culpas came like the tide. And for six years, they were greeted with silence or fire. We burned more gifts than bodies in that decade, but they would not stop coming. And Lestat's relentless determination began to crack my considerable armor. Perhaps it was the modesty of the gesture, but in the spring of 1937, one broke through. He had written it himself in the music of the hour. His first composition in a hundred years.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I loved Claudia with all my heart and I loved Lestat with a wounded one. The work would be convincing the two to find room again for each other.
- Daniel Molloy: Can you fly, Louis?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: No.
- Daniel Molloy: So for twenty years, you lived with the vampire Lestat and you didn't know he had the flying gift?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: The Cloud Gift. And yes, it was a remarkable bit of restraint he managed.
- Daniel Molloy: Why would he do that?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I suppose he thought if he exposed all his power to me, I would never feel his equal and the relationship would suffer.
- Daniel Molloy: 'He only beat me the one time, Officer. It's not his fault.' Classic Stockholm, eh, Doc?
- Dr. Fareed Bhansali: I am not here.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: She's coming up on 33.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: It's a lick and a promise in vampire years.
- Claudia: Maybe, but I'm not your child anymore. That's rule number five. I'll be your companion, your sister.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: It's not as simple as choosing a new family configuration. 'Now I'm your cousin.' 'Now I'm your aunt.' I am your maker!
- Claudia: But not my uncle or my daddy. I'm your sister or that's the door.
- [Louis bursts into Antoinette's house to find her and Lestat naked in bed]
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: [shouting] Six years of begging. You think a song's gon' get a rise out of me?
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Did you like it?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: This her singing?
- Lestat de Lioncourt: It's a clear voice. I wanted to obstacle to the lyric.
- [Louis smashes the record]
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Write me a song and put your lover's voice on it? What the fuck is wrong with your head?
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Louis, you're soaking wet.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I swim faster than I drive.
- [to Antoinette]
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Put some clothes on. Get the fuck out.
- Antoinette: This is my house.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Do I look like I care?
- Antoinette: Lestat.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Leave.
- [to Louis]
- Lestat de Lioncourt: You swam the Mississippi to find me?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I hate you.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: As you should.
- Daniel Molloy: He could fly?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Yes.
- Daniel Molloy: Like Superman?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Not like Superman. Superman is a fictional character.
- Daniel Molloy: But in the air with a 'fuck you to Newtonian physics' flying?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: He said it was more like floating, arising at will, propelling in a direction by the decision. He called it 'the Cloud Gift.'
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Claudia, hello. I've been calling quite often. I don't know if the operator is patching me through correctly.
- [Claudia stares without answering]
- Lestat de Lioncourt: I brought something from Louis's favorite bookshop. 'The Book of Hours.' Extremely rare, 15th century. Silver and gold on the vellum, palettes of blue and old rose.
- Claudia: No one here wishes to speak with you.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Well, I know he's upstairs. I can see his silhouette. Perhaps we should let him decide if he wants to see me or not.
- [Louis throws Lestat's coffin off the balcony and it shatters on the street behind Lestat]
- Claudia: How's that for an answer?
- Claudia: Who made you?
- Lestat de Lioncourt: His name was Magnus. He took me from my room in Paris as I kicked and screamed. He kept me for a week, locked in a room full of corpses. Some freshly killed, some bloated and black. But they all looked like me -- my coloring, my physique, my own eyes staring back at me from rotting faces. He fed on me every night and then he put me back in the tower with the lookalike corpses. I thought for sure I'd be one of them, but instead he turned me into this. No grand history of vampiric origins or physiology, no rules, no counsel. Just a sweeping hand to a pile of money and the sight of him throwing himself into a fire. And then I was alone. I thought, 'I can't drink hot blood. I can't feed on others.' I cried. I called to God. I didn't want this. But I have a capacity for enduring. That's why I don't particularly like being abandoned.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: [on finding out that Lestat didn't kill Antoinette] It wasn't shocking. It was perfectly consistent with his nature. He'd been told to do something, and, brat that he was, didn't like being told what to do. The effect, however, was numbing.
- Claudia: 'I Felt a Funeral in My Brain.' She also wrote one called 'A Coffin Is a Small Domain.' I mean, come on!
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Emily Dickinson is not a vampire.
- Claudia: How do you know?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Cause she's dead.
- Claudia: How do you know?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: She got a grave. She got a tombstone.
- Claudia: So do you.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: She's an affected, self-absorbed, nasty little creature who's fooled herself into thinking she's smarter than she is, and she is poisoning Louis against me.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Years accumulated in the small city were catching up to us. Our home was often vandalized. Cowardly warnings suggesting we were no longer welcome. 'Please return from the dark place you came from.' It was an awkward time. I loved Claudia with all my heart and I loved Lestat with a wounded one. The work would be convincing the two to find room again for each other. Concessions would be needed. I would have to lead by example.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: For six years in all, these raw and desperate mea culpas came like the tide. And for six years, they were greeted with silence or fire. We burned more gifts than bodies in that decade, but they would not stop coming. And Lestat's relentless determination began to crack my considerable armor. Perhaps it was the modesty of the gesture... but in the spring of 1937, one broke through. He had written it himself in the music of the hour. His first composition in 100 years... Rashid, please play the song in question for Mr. Molloy and the doctor.
- Dr. Fareed Bhansali: I'm not here.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: [Come to Me plays in the background] He had engaged a local record company. And when the musicians they hired proved unsatisfactory, he played all the instruments himself.
- Daniel Molloy: That's his voice?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Yeah. He pressed only one album. Had the master recordings destroyed. You're listening to an inferior re-recording now. The audacity of it all was matched only by its sincerity. He had made the near-perfect valentine... with one flaw. One perfectly premeditated flaw.
- Dr. Fareed Bhansali: Pleasure never meeting you, Mr. Molloy.
- Daniel Molloy: He said to no one.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Quick and clever despite two bags of fluid.
- Daniel Molloy: Legal dope makes me constipated, but the wit flows like a river.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Dark woods and bridged rivers. Then the lights of a city depot. Birmingham. Atlanta. Greensboro. Washington, D.C. She, of all things on the Earth, deserved a nice seat and a wide window to watch the countryside blur before the glass. But it was 1939, and the only Negro allowed in first class was the porter, and the Negro passenger rode the rear. The Negro vampire made do with what was left, which was fine with her.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I teased the sun that night in Jackson Square. Thought about the walking cane and pile of ash they'd find in the morning. But Paul had forever ruined Grace's wedding night, and I would not do the same to Claudia on the anniversary of her escape. If I was to join Dante's Wood of the Self-Murdered, it would be another night. And so I endured my way home, back to the crypt, back to the undeserving Lestat.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: This is the part of my story, back in San Francisco, where you said, and I paraphrase, 'Give it to me. Make me a vampire now.'
- Daniel Molloy: In the eyes of a 20-year-old, you were wasting the gift.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: You're in your twenties, Rashid. What do you think?
- Rashid: Well, Mr. du Lac presides in the most desired real estate in the country. I do not see the waste Mr. Molloy sees.
- Daniel Molloy: Yeah, well, he lived in a dump the last time we did this.
- Claudia: [Crying] Let me go, Lestat.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: In Louis hour of need? I'm afraid I can't allow that. He's very fragile right now. Worse than the last time you abandoned him, when you filled your head with knowledge and hitched a ride on a motorbike.
- [Claudia shudders]
- Lestat de Lioncourt: Well, you wouldn't talk of it. Louis insisted I not ask. I love our family, but the rules are, 'No secrets!' Fortunate for our family, when I put my mind to it, I can hear the thoughts of other vampires at a very great distance.
- Claudia: Bastard.
- Lestat de Lioncourt: He thinks of you often... Bruce.
- Claudia: Fucking bastard!
- Lestat de Lioncourt: I couldn't agree more. What he did to you was in very poor taste. Could you imagine if something like that happened to you again? Louis would never forgive himself. Back in your cage, sweetheart. We endure each other for Louis' happiness. So come home, and make him happy. Because if you try this again, Claudia, I won't snap your leg, defile your pocket and zoom off on a motorbike. I'll turn your bones to dust.
- [conversing telepathically]
- Claudia: I've been having a thought the last few days, Louis.
- Claudia: Yeah, what's that?
- Claudia: I think he killed Magnus. I think the vampire made him a slave. And he would be a slave no more than I would, and so he killed him. Killed him before he knew all the things he could've known. And now he's gone and made us slaves to him.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: We're not slaves. Maybe mindless accomplices.
- Claudia: No, we're his slaves, and I will free us both.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Claudia.
- Claudia: We have no more use for him, and he causes us misery with no horizon.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I don't like what you're feeling right now. You can't kill...
- Claudia: I love you, Louis. I don't say it often enough anymore.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: If you love me, then listen to me. I beg you.
- Claudia: If you're going to beat Lestat, you have to become Lestat. You have to think like he does and then five moves ahead of that.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: But he's not mortal. No illness can touch him. You threaten a life that will endure until the end of the world.
- Claudia: I am done enduring. I'm going to kill him.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: He'll destroy you if you try it.
- Claudia: No, Louis. I can kill him... And I want to tell you something else now, a secret of all secrets, between you and me... The secret is, Louis, you want to kill him too and you will enjoy doing it.
- Young Daniel Molloy: Are you a narc?
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: I'm a vampire.
- [both laugh]
- Young Daniel Molloy: I want to interview you.
- Louis de Pointe du Lac: Sounds fun.