"Good morning everybody. This is February 22, 1995,....
Um, I had a very, very strange experience this week that
I want to share with you: Lestat...left me. For those of you
who are readers, who have seen the movie, you know who I mean.
The Vampire Lestat, he left me. He departed me forever. And
this doesn't mean he died, or anything like that, he just left
me. I finished making the very last corrections on the galleys
of my novel _Memnoch, the Devil_ which is the fifth novel I've
written with Lestat, I wrote it February of last year, and I
went back over it February this year, and as I completed the
last page, I knew that Lestat was leaving. He didn't quite say
it to me directly, but we both kind of sensed that the five books
had finished what we had to do together. And I wrote in ink on
the last page, "Adieu, mon amour," commending him to God. I
probably murdered the pronunciation of that in French, but then
he's French, I'm not. I can tell you exactly where he disappeared.
He disappeared in the twenty-hundred (2000) block of St. Charles
Avenue, only about 25 to 30 feet downtown from the Ponchartrain
Hotel. He disappeared in that spot. That's where he was standing
when my imagination left him. And he was looking in a shop window,
there's a place on that corner that used to be a Mercedez-Benz
dealership, and he just happened to be passing there and he saw
himself in the glass, of...of that empty store, or building,
and...that was the last time he and I looked at each other, he's
gone. He's absolutely gone. And now it's my obligation as a
writer to create new characters and to think about my new
book _Servant of the Bones_ and to try to make characters that can
talk for me, as eloquently as Lestat did because he's not going to
come back. I know that."