Top 30 Quotes From Daniel Molloy

Daniel: Hey, Doc, did you know there's a flying vampire apocalypse coming your way?
Louis: Most vampires do not possess the Cloud Gift. With few exceptions, only the most ancient of us have it.
Daniel: You know he's a vampire, right?
Dr. Fareed Bhansali: I do not discuss my patients with anyone but the patients themselves.
Daniel: [to the recorder] That's the voice of Dr. Fareer Bhansali...
Dr. Fareed Bhansali: That is not my voice.
Daniel: ...He's the personal physician to the deputy prime minister and...
Dr. Fareed Bhansali: And I am not here.
Daniel: ...the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac.
Rashid: He's officially off the record.
Daniel: NDAs signed by any and all who cross the threshold, eh?

Louis: I've seen death over and over and over and over again. It's boring.
Daniel: That'll make a great blurb.

Daniel: Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he *was* Charlie Manson.
Louis: Is that all you think of her?
Daniel: Mostly. I also think she makes you an Frenchy look like a couple of whiny, existential queens. Probably why she's a fuckin' gold mine. The girl who moves a million books.
Louis: I won't have her exploited.
Daniel: Won't matter what your intentions are. It's the world out there now. She's the single-shooter, Xbox, mouth-breather shit they crave.
Louis: You can put the diaries in a proper context.
Daniel: Context. Sure. Warn the world about a forthcoming apocalypse. Or maybe inspire a line of sexy Claudia Halloween costumes. Or a cool dismemberment trend amongst the suburban Sylvia Plath set. Once you put it out there, they decide what it is. It can get away from you.

Daniel: I've been fired from three papers, hired back at two of them, third got gobbled up by Knight Ridder. So to be clear here, I'm a goddamn reservoir of dos and don'ts.

Dr. Fareed Bhansali: Pleasure never meeting you, Mr. Molloy.
Daniel: He said to no one.
Louis: Quick and clever despite two bags of fluid.
Daniel: Legal dope makes me constipated, but the wit flows like a river.

Daniel: Memory is a monster. We forget. It doesn't.

Louis: Vampires are killers. Apex predators whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment, the ability to see a human life in its entirety, not with any mawkish sorrow, but with the thrilling satisfaction of being the end of that life and having a hand in the divine plan.
Daniel: Don't expect every reader to swallow that one.

Rashid: How is your reading coming along?
Daniel: For a killing machine, I kinda like her.

Louis: Vivid writer, isn't she? A singular style.
Daniel: Anne Frank meets Stephen King.

Louis: Charlie's death ushered in one of the darkest eras in our lives. The oh-so-delicate balance of our oh-so-delicate household was shattered. The fantasy of happiness burst. Claudia was...
Daniel: A band-aid for a shitty marriage?
Louis: I was going to say... something else. But yes, that's almost certainly what she felt like.

Louis: When you were using drugs, Mr. Molloy, do you remember the best you ever had?
Daniel: Berkely, 1978, some Mexican black tar that Carly and Pedro were slinging.
Louis: So imagine that flowing inside your veins again. Now, multiply it by miles to the rings of Saturn and back... He had taken what he called 'un petit coup,' the little drink. Not enough to kill me, but just enough to keep him fit. It takes an enormous amount of restraint for us, the little drink. For a human, experiencing it for the first time, it was... unsettling. And not for the physical toll it took on my body, which was significant, but for the feelings of intimacy it awoke within me. I had never allowed myself to feel emotionally close to anyone, much less a man. I had no room for feelings like these in my life. You could be a lot of things in New Orleans, but an openly gay Negro man was not one of 'em.

Daniel: Here's another question: That's the sun out there; where's your coffin?
Louis: You're standing in it.

Daniel: You were the prince of your district. Lestat chased an American icon out of town because he loved you. 1917 doesn't sound like it was such a bad year.
Louis: Rigged to burn, Daniel.

Louis: I had no words for her. What words were there? 'It all happened so fast.' 'I was trying to save you.' 'All vampires are born out of trauma.' We made her out of remorse. Out of selfishness.
Daniel: Poor dear. She wasn't held enough between ritualistic murders.
Louis: She spent every night for half a decade with no friends, locked in the emotional storm of puberty.
Daniel: Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.
Louis: Is that all you think of her?
Daniel: Mostly. I also think she makes you and Frenchy look like a couple of whiny, existential queens.

Daniel: It's not an interview; it's a... it's a fever dream told to an idiot.

Louis: You've grown old, Daniel.
Daniel: Yeah, well, mortality beats a heavy drum.

Louis: Is your medicine taking?
Daniel: It's cold and itchy. Thanks for asking.
Louis: Are you still dreaming about our first meeting, Daniel?
Daniel: I keep waking up just before you ask me back to your shitty apartment.

Daniel: Can you fly, Louis?
Louis: No.
Daniel: So for twenty years, you lived with the vampire Lestat and you didn't know he had the flying gift?
Louis: The Cloud Gift. And yes, it was a remarkable bit of restraint he managed.
Daniel: Why would he do that?
Louis: I suppose he thought if he exposed all his power to me, I would never feel his equal and the relationship would suffer.
Daniel: 'He only beat me the one time, Officer. It's not his fault.' Classic Stockholm, eh, Doc?
Dr. Fareed Bhansali: I am not here.

Daniel: You started hanging out.
Louis: He was in love with my city and wanted to know everything he could about it.
Daniel: So you played docent to the gentleman vampire?
Louis: He had not revealed his vampire nature yet.
Daniel: I'm assuming you only met at night.
Louis: It's New Orleans. Days are for sleeping off the previous evening's damage.
Daniel: Perfect cover for a vampire.
Louis: Racing ahead again, Mr. Molloy. Let the tale seduce you. Just as I was seduced.

Daniel: So, it begs the question, where were all these diaries in 1973?
Louis: Scattered. One in New Orleans, another in Paris.
Daniel: Bullshit.
Louis: [long pause] Claudia was... everything. I loved her unconditionally. All the noise, the chaos, the crisis of my former existence, silenced. The simple joy of her hand in mine.
Daniel: You had a daughter.
Louis: I had a daughter.
Daniel: I've got two. The love is kind of...
Louis: And if you were to come across their diaries and learn, in detail, how and when you failed them, would you share those failures with a brash young reporter you met at Polynesian Mary's?

Rashid: What do you think will happen to Mr. du Lac when you publish this book and the other vampires of the world get their hands on it?
Daniel: As long as they pay full freight.

[upon being confronted about the discrepancies in his recollection of his life with Lestat]
Louis: The version we speak of now is the more nuanced portrait.
Daniel: Hmm. Or the more rehearsed.
Louis: Perhaps I was mistaken about the 'Wolverine Blues.'
Daniel: Fuck the 'Wolverine Blues.' Ken Burns can choke on the footnotes. It's the abused-abuser psychological relationship I'm talking about.
Louis: I do not consider myself abused.
Daniel: I mean, usually when you're a little too close to it, the abused still loves the abuser, but you flipped it completely on its head.
Louis: I'm not a victim.
Daniel: Fifty years later, you talk like he was your soulmate. Like you were locked in some fucked up gothic romance. Why?
Louis: [reading from Daniel's memoir] 'I am in my Buick, staring in the rearview mirror at my daughter in the car seat, an hour after I gave Derek, a guy I don't know, the last 30 bucks I had. My editor reminds me it's seven years before car seats are mandatory. My ex-wife reminds me I never owned a Buick. This is the odyssey of recollection.'
[closes book]
Louis: The tapes are an admitted performance. This is the premise of our interview. Half a century later, allow me my odyssey.
[Daniel throws away the tapes of their first interview]
Louis: Now who's performing?

Louis: 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: [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: That's his voice?
Louis: 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.

[as Daniel is surveying a painting in Louis's apartment]
Rashid: It's Venetian. A contemporary of Tintoretto's.
Daniel: 'Marius de Romanus.' Never heard of him.
Rashid: Little of his work survives. Mr. de Pointe du Lac covets the rare.

Louis: 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: In the eyes of a 20-year-old, you were wasting the gift.
Louis: 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: Yeah, well, he lived in a dump the last time we did this.

Louis: It bears repeating, I did not consider myself a homosexual man at the time. I mean, I had had experiences. Guilt, shame, floating-on-a-sea-of-vodka type encounters. Obviously, I've come to embrace my sexuality. Course, you know that. We met at a gay bar, didn't we, Daniel?
Daniel: It was a good place to score. I did what I had to.

Louis: Two vampires walk into a church. That's where we left off.
Daniel: Blissing out post-priesticide.

Louis: Many streets in New Orleans weren't paved at the time. The mud on his boots could've come from anywhere.
Daniel: Was it raining that night?
[Louis recalls his conversation with Jonah without rain]
Daniel: Did it rain?
[Louis recalls his conversation with Jonah again, this time with rain]
Louis: I don't remember now. It could've been dry in the bayou and wet in the Quarter. It's Louisiana.
Daniel: The odyssey of recollection.

Daniel: He could fly?
Louis: Yes.
Daniel: Like Superman?
Louis: Not like Superman. Superman is a fictional character.
Daniel: But in the air with a 'fuck you to Newtonian physics' flying?
Louis: He said it was more like floating, arising at will, propelling in a direction by the decision. He called it 'the Cloud Gift.'

Louis: I couldn't believe it. Staring me down as his hands went wandering the seams of Miss Lily's dress. I wanted to take the end of my cane and slit his throat with it.
Daniel: Why didn't you?
Louis: I couldn't move. My body was seized with weakness. His gaze tied a string around my lungs, and I found myself immobilized.