Another fan question for Lestat answered:

Lestat here. I want to answer this question from Zaira Maranelli: 

“Lestat… could you explain to me what is love for you? I speak about the deep love that make you suffer and pain, that make you forget about you and your thoughts… Have you really ever felt that?” Love, for me, Zaira, is caring for another so completely that that person is as important to you as yourself, so that you suffer when that person suffers, you know joy when that person knows joy, and you cannot separate your own fate from that person’s fate without considerable angst and misery. That is love. And yes, I have known it — for my mother, for my beloved Nicholas and for Louis, and for Claudia, and for Armand and for others. Love is rooted in understanding, deep emotional and physical attraction, and in common sympathy. And once you love some one like that, well, you have given a hostage to fate. I find it impossible to live without loving. I find it excruciating to feel that I am utterly unloved. I thrive on loving and on being loved. I cannot contemplate living for any length of time without the hope of love, without hoping to experience love in my daily existence, and without the hope of knowing love in the future. In my worst trials, the memory of having been loved, and of loving has sustained me. Part of the agony of loving can be discovering that you have been cruel to the one you love, that you have cheated that person, that you have rejected the loved one when you did not mean to do it at all, that you have failed the person utterly. I have experienced all this; the fault was in me; not in loving. I have loved imperfectly, but I’m learning to love in new and better ways all the time.