Roger Zelazny Quotes

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

I enjoy slaughtering beasts, and I think of my relatives constantly.

Strygalldwir is my name. Conjure with it and I will eat your heart and liver." "Conjure with it? I can't even pronounce it, and my cirrhosis would give you indigestion.

In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils; and on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on the day the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I too will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Until then, I will not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?" "Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

Time passed slowly, like and old man climbing a hill.

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.

Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.

Tonight I will suck the marrow from your bones!” it said. “I will dry them and work them most cunningly into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!” “You burn prettily,” I said.

Good-bye and hello, as always.

Love is a negative form of hatred.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

A powerful flight of the imagination . . . an entirely enjoyable reading experience, wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence.

If a building is falling on you, you don't concern yourself with the horn of an approaching car. You deal with the most immediate peril first. That's survival.

Thus did I bear Sir Lancelot de Lac to the Keep of Ganleon, whom I trusted like a brother. That is to say, not at all.

That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.

Of course it does not apply to me. I am the soul of honor, kindness, mercy and goodness. Trust me in all things.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.

Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.

'Fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming.

There are none of you, good doctors, could cope with my family anyway.

Sleep is perhaps the only among life's great pleasures which need not be of short duration.

Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.

The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.

Nobody steals books but your friends.

I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking — by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.

Do you work for the government, any government?” "I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.

While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.

There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.

I tried a very fancy attack I'd learned in France, which involved a beat, a feint in quarte, a feint in sixte, and a lunge veering off into an attack on his wrist. I nicked him, and the blood flowed.

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

It would be nice if there were some one thing constant and unchanging in the universe. If there is such a thing, then it is a thing which would have to be stronger than love, and it is a thing which I do not know.

Any man would be forsworn to gain a kingdom.

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.

If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something--or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.