Date of Birth: October 4, 1941
Birthplace: New Orleans, LA
Current Residence: New Orleans, LA
Education: Attended Texas Women's University; San Francisco State College, B.A., 1964; M.A., 1971; graduate study at University of California, Berkely, 1969-70.

I'm almost obsessively concerned with certain moral issues and questions: How do we live a good life when it seems almost impossible? How do we go on when it seems meaningless? The novels to me have to mean a great deal or they're worthless. If they're not about us and they're not about everything that concerns us?if they're just about vampires and witches?then I've failed.
-Anne Rice, Cox News Service

That's the whole purpose, I think, of what people call fantasy writing. You can put the most horrible things into a frame, and you can go into that frame safely and talk about those things.
-Anne Rice, Rolling Stone, July 13, 1995

She has...left her permanent mark on an American cultural icon. Never a rich tradition, vampire fiction seemed close to petering out before Ms. Rice turned her hand to it; she was among the first to ditch the moldy crypts, the garlic, the quasi-Catholic claptrap that threatened to make vampires merely quaint and icky. Ms. Rices's thoroughly modern monsters can't be so easily dismissed: they are sexy, powerful and above all dangerous.
-Walter Kendrick, New York Times, October 14, 1992