For some people, supernatural stories about vampires and witches only come around October and Halloween. But for a writer like Anne Rice, those tales were her bread and butter—not just a fall-time thing—making her the well-known Gothic writer she is today. As EBSCO reported, she was “influential” and is known for her Gothic fiction as well as a slew of other stories, ranging from retellings of Catholic Bible stories to erotica. And our quote of the day comes from Franz Kafka‘s influence on Rice, and how Kafka inspired her to be herself and not reject her uniqueness.
Speaking of being unique, Rice came into this world with an unconventional streak right off the bat; she was born on Oct. 4, 1941, with the name Howard Allen O’Brien, after her father, per Britannica. She did, understandably, hate that first name and chose “Anne” on her first day of school in her hometown of New Orleans, LA. Rice came from a family who loved to spin tales; it was a hobby for her father (which rubbed off on Rice and her sisters), and her mother loved to tell stories that involved supernatural and fantastical elements, per EBSCO.
From her upbringing to her place of birth, Rice was surrounded by inspiration to create one of the most well-known vampire novels of all time. According to Britannica, Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire in a little over a month (five weeks), and it was published in 1976.
Her experience with grief and death also influenced her writing; Rice’s mother died when she was a young teenager, and her daughter, Michele, died of leukemia at only five years old, which inspired the character of Claudia, a child who becomes a vampire and gains eternal life. As Rice told The New York Times in 1988, the story wasn’t make-believe for her: “For the first time, I was able to describe my reality, the dark, gothic influence on my childhood… My childhood came to life for me.”
This well-known book went on to become a best-selling series called the Vampire Chronicles, which consisted of 13 books. Famously, the first novel inspired the 1994 Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt film of the same name, as well as the AMC series. Rice died in 2021, but her legacy still lives on today.
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Quote of the Day by Anne Rice
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“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
This statement was written by Anne Rice in the foreword she penned for a 1995 collection of Franz Kafka’s stories that included The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony.
Throughout the foreword, Rice wrote about how Kafka’s surreal, out-there, sometimes-nightmarish stories inspired her. In the paragraph in which she writes this line, she calls the German-language Czech writer a “model” for her and “a continuing inspiration.” She said:
“Not only did he exhibit an irrepressible originality—who else would think of things like this!—he seemed to say that only in one’s most personal language can the crucial tales of a writer be told. Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel a particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share.”
As Quote Investigator reported, many people misattribute this quote to Kafka. It’s most likely due to where it originated and also because Rice is detailing a concept or idea that was shaped by Kafka’s writing.
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Deeper Meaning of Anne Rice’s Quote—Embrace Your Uniqueness
Vampire novels aren’t new, and Anne Rice didn’t invent them. However, it does take a lot of imagination and a desire to be true to writing something a little weird in order to create something as good and groundbreaking as Interview with the Vampire. Becoming a Gothic writer in the ‘70s is no small feat, nor is it conventional, so it makes sense that Rice was inspired by Kafka’s strong sense of his visionary talent and resolve in his uniqueness.
As Rice says, Kafka’s work showed he didn’t care about conformity or what was “normal”; he forged his own path, even inspiring his own adjective based on his stories. He also died relatively unknown in 1924, with a lot of his work published after the fact. So he was writing for himself and doing it because he was passionate, not for fame or fortune. Rice’s quote is a sentiment to what she took from his life and work: don’t conform, your writing doesn’t need to “make sense” and don’t let others shrink you down.
Taking the quote at face value without the Kafka influence, Rice is still urging readers to be themselves. Don’t “water” yourself down to be more digestible to others. Don’t make yourself fit into some box society has carved out for you so you’re more palatable. Don’t ever allow yourself to contort into something you’re not, just for societal consumption.
She says to “follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly,” meaning to be unabashedly you. Love what you love, even if it’s not “cool” or popular. Be into your niche—maybe weird—hyperfixations, hobbies or likes. When you are entirely yourself, living and creating authentically, you rid yourself of the burden of caring what others think, and it frees you up for immense joy and happiness. All the things you can do and make when you’re free are endless.
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More Quotes from Anne Rice
- “To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
- “I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.”
- “We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.”
- “There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.”
- “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.”
- “To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
- “None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
- “Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
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