There’s a meaningful, protracted silence. “I have contemplated this very question many times. What choice would I make, knowing all that I know now, with all the understanding I now possess about the nature of the thing I embarked on that night, when I all but bore my throat to Lestat, and begged, in not to very many words, to be transformed? I hadn’t the courage for death, but I couldn’t endure life, either. I chose what seemed to me, then, to be both. It was certainly a kind of death, I presided over the passing of the man that I had been before the change that very night. But that man had been a fool, he had wasted... so much precious time, blundering as mortals do, thinking that their lives are long, and that there will always be more time. This is a common mistake of the young, to think there will always be more time. I was one of those, I wouldn’t call it arrogance, but disregard. I had no idea how precious my life was. I understood that the lives of others were precious. Paul, for example. I couldn’t comprehend that Paul had been stolen from life so soon, while I endured. What was life to me? Obligation, I was blind to it. I only understood how precious it was until I became a vampire, and by that time it was too late. I will never know, now, what my life could have been. I may have been killed in a duel. I might have lost myself to the drinking and died that way. My mind might have recovered from the loss of Paul but my soul would never be healed, the kind of existence I might have known would not have been, in either case, a happy one. It seemed my choices were narrowed so that I could either abandon mortality or die. And without the stomach to end my own life, naturally, I gave myself over to Lestat. But you want to know if I would still make the same choice, if I could return to that moment. It would mean that I should suffer the years as I have, the same loss. It would mean knowingly repeating the same vital mistakes. But I would. I have seen more beauty in one night as a vampire than I ever saw in a thousand radiant days, no matter how much I might now miss it. The beauty of the world was closed to me before. I was blind to it. I have known such a profound respect for life because my eyes were opened, and I understand now that there truly was no choice. Choice, free will, these are often illusions, from the moment I laid eyes on Lestat I was irrevocably lost, my life became tied to his life and so it was vital that the severance in death never come. I had to be born to this darkness, as I call it, to know him, to know all that would proceed from him and from the endless experience that was my being a vampire. I can never go back, I could never change the mind of the stubborn suffering creature I was, who made me what I am now, and gave his life in exchange for eternity. And perhaps I wouldn’t try. Perhaps he was right.”