Phone Message Transcript: September 28, 1997
[appearing on Anne's fan phone line]
"Hi, this is Anne Rice, and it's September 28th, 1997, and I'm reading Camille Paglia (VAMPS AND TRAMPS)...extraordinary ideas that I really don't agree with, but I have to coalesce my thoughts here. I have to get everything together.
By the way, I want to say to the person who called in last night, you mentioned that you didn't care for my wealthy characters. I understand your point of view, but really my gift is to write about what fascinates me, and I am not a good chronicler of the working class or the middle class. We have American writers who are absolutely brilliant at that, and they're very much expressions of the 20th Century and its preoccupation with those classes. My job really is to write about other things and really my characters in the 20th Century
are no wealthier than Hamlet or, I don't know, Oedipus Rex, or different people throughout the ages. They're no more wealthy than Macbeth, they're no more wealthy than Tonio Teschi in my own book, CRY TO HEAVEN. The vampires Louis, Lestat and Armand all had continuous flow of gold. The point of this is not that one has to be rich to be morally interesting, but that it's easier for me to write about someone who is concentrating on problems that are generated from the soul, that do not have to do not have to do with economics. Again, it's not that I think that this is superior. There are other people who are very, very good at doing things that have to do with economic binds, class, class struggle, deprivation and so forth. I don't. Maybe I just have experienced too much of it in my life.
But anyway, thank you very much for your thoughts. Please leave me a message. Good-bye. Thank you."