Richard K. Morgan Quotes & Sayings

For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds. — Richard K. Morgan

People are sheep, Ringil raged. Moronic fucking sheep. — Richard K. Morgan

If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so. — Richard K. Morgan

Strange how you could become a man's god without noticing. — Richard K. Morgan

I've heard that said about outlanders and enemies before, and I don't generally trust it. Just too bloody convenient, the quick and easy way to deal with difference. Oh, they're not like us, they're insane. It saves you having to think too much. — Richard K. Morgan

I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults. — Richard K. Morgan

No such thing as time travel, he'd rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you've done, and try in the future to do what you're happy to live with. — Richard K. Morgan

Rumor ran in the slum streets of Trelayne like sewage in the gutters, mingled and colorful in its contents, but mostly shit. — Richard K. Morgan

If I know anything about stack engineers, they'll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone. — Richard K. Morgan

Most people don't like to think things through. Too much effort. They'd rather have the edited visceral highlights. — Richard K. Morgan

You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you're God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don't really matter anymore. You've seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you're standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you'll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet. — Richard K. Morgan

We're all bound for the Sky Road, sooner or later. How we walk it depends on how we walked in the world beneath. So you don't sit on your arse whining and waiting for your death to come find you. You go looking for it. Track the fucker down, force the issue. You walk, Archidi, you find the strength to walk, and you keep walking till you drop. Now some men don't have that strength, so you have to lend it to them. — Richard K. Morgan

I came quite late to gaming: I didn't start playing until 2002. — Richard K. Morgan

Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he'd absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he'd gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim's. He'd known at some deep, cold level that he would cope. He was wrong. Utterly. — Richard K. Morgan

No one in that city understands, Gil, because it doesn't matter to them anymore. They've never learned to fear the steel and the men who carry it, and none of them ever will, because they don't have to. Because in this place I've seen, men like that don't exist anymore. We don't exist anymore.
Sounds like a beautiful fucking place. How do I get there? Ringil grinned fiercely up at the Kiriath clan captain. Oh wait - you're going to tell me the rents are sky-high, right? And how am I going to earn a living if they keep their swords in a museum? — Richard K. Morgan

Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom, please. On — Richard K. Morgan

There should have been a better farewell. But in the end, there never is. And we take what meagre scraps we can find. — Richard K. Morgan

The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest. — Richard K. Morgan

Running away just makes your arse a bigger target. — Richard K. Morgan

I'm Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case. — Richard K. Morgan

Make it personal. — Richard K. Morgan

She wanted to do damage, gashed red, bleeding, and screaming damage to all and any of the bland facets of social restraint that meshed her about like spiderweb. — Richard K. Morgan

You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn't occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it's a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes. — Richard K. Morgan

What others believe is not my concern, unless they attempt to force it on me. — Richard K. Morgan

Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling. — Richard K. Morgan

Ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life, and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal. QUELLCRIST FALCONER Things I Should Have Learned by Now Volume II There — Richard K. Morgan

Take up citizenship and the conversion it entailed, send a couple of your sons to the levy when they were of age, pay taxes calculated not to drive you and your family into penury or the mountains and the life of a bandit. Oh, and while you're at it, steer clear of debt and disease. Chances were - mostly - if you did all that, you'd never starve, never have your home burned down and your children raped before your eyes, never have to wear a slave collar. — Richard K. Morgan

I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance. — Richard K. Morgan

When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix's underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft's torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping. — Richard K. Morgan

It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. — Richard K. Morgan

In the end, she said, a little bitterly, facing him in warm perfumed bathwater one evening, despite wealth, despite wisdom, despite contacts and court alliances, I am still a woman. And I will be judged on all counts for that single fact, via the cursed fucking geometry of how pleasing I am to the eye. Cheekbones and arse cheeks are my destiny. — Richard K. Morgan

There's a lot of young authors out there, and people do seem to forget: in order to write well, you do need to have some experience. — Richard K. Morgan

Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren't overly imaginative - which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys - but they weren't any kind of pushover, either. We'd all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them. — Richard K. Morgan

I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true. — Richard K. Morgan

The tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth. — Richard K. Morgan

I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character. — Richard K. Morgan

Religion's just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can't do the same when it comes to the crunch. These people are sheep. They'll do whatever their holy men tell them. — Richard K. Morgan

Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. — Richard K. Morgan

These are pious, clean-living men, worshipping at the temple of their own bodies."
"Hmm. Sounds distinctly erotic. — Richard K. Morgan

The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whiskey, burning ... — Richard K. Morgan

It's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that it's nothing personal.
Well, fuck them.
Make it personal. — Richard K. Morgan

The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there's a strange comfort to the way it hurts. — Richard K. Morgan

Men were like blades, they would all break sooner or later, you included. But you looked around at the men you led, and in their eyes you saw what kind of steel you had to hand, how it had been forged and tempered, what blows, if any, it would take. — Richard K. Morgan

No." A look of dawning comprehension. "Ah, that. The regret, is that what you're talking about? This sense of loss? Yes, he always talked about that, too. It's a mortal thing, as far as I can tell. The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow. It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they'll never take, things they'll never do. At some level, the organism seems to know that. — Richard K. Morgan

Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. — Richard K. Morgan

Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand, Ringil said quietly. — Richard K. Morgan

Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves
and burn your fingers once again. — Richard K. Morgan

It seems lies come very easily to your race. They lie to those they lead, to their mates and fellows no matter how close- drawn, even to themselves if it will make the world around them more bearable. It is hard to know what to believe in this place." Something — Richard K. Morgan

Pull on the cold, clinking mail of your professional detachment, Archeth Indamaninarmal, inhabit it until it starts to feel warm and accustomed, and in time you'll forget you're wearing it at all. You'll only notice when it works, when it stops you feeling the steel-edged bite of something that might otherwise have gotten through and done you some damage. And then you'll just grin and shiver and shake off the blow, like warriors do. — Richard K. Morgan

Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of ... whatever. Face the facts. Then act. QUELLCRIST — Richard K. Morgan

There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. — Richard K. Morgan

In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough. — Richard K. Morgan

It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat's maze poorly. — Richard K. Morgan

But I won't watch them go to war again. I've been to war, you know, to save civilization from the reptile hordes. I bled for it, I saw friends and other men die for it. And then I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilization we'd saved, in squabbles over a few hundred square miles of territory and what language the people get to speak there, what color their skin and hair is and what kind of religious horseshit they get crammed down their throats. — Richard K. Morgan

When they ask how I died, tell them: still angry. — Richard K. Morgan

The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterward. — Richard K. Morgan

According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense. — Richard K. Morgan

Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying. — Richard K. Morgan

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely. — Richard K. Morgan

That's right, Dragonbane. And brothers always stood together, the buffalo came when they were called, the grass grew taller and greener, and it never fucking rained. Get a grip, old man. — Richard K. Morgan

You and I will be dust and half-remembered tales before they even start to build that city. But it will come, and when it does, this sword will still be there to see it. Kiriath steel - built to harm, built to last. When all the damage it's done and the grief it's caused have been forgotten, even by the gods, when the Kiriath themselves have passed into discredited myth, this murderous fucking ... thing ... will hang unused, and harmless, and gaped at by children. That's how it ends, Gil. With no one to remember, or care, or understand what this thing could do when you set it free. — Richard K. Morgan

Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts. — Richard K. Morgan

Knowledge tossed away," she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. "Willful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand." At — Richard K. Morgan

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off?
- Quellcrist Falconer — Richard K. Morgan

Kovacs to a female believer in New Revelation: ..I'm calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband's angle, he's a man, he's got everything to gain from this crapshit. But you? You've thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You'll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it's soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you'll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we've won for ourselves to come back and try again. You'll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you'll condemn her to the same fucking thing — Richard K. Morgan

And now he couldn't cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds. — Richard K. Morgan

The city you speak of will be built - will stand in all its undeserved serenity - on the bones of a billion unjust, unremembered deaths. Its foundation stones are mortared with the blood of ten thousand suffering generations that no one there recalls or cares about. Its citizens live out their safe, butterfly lives in covered gardens and brilliant halls without the slightest idea or interest in how they came to have it all. She comes abruptly back to the here and now. Turns and flashes him a hard little smile. Do you really think that you could stand to live among such people? — Richard K. Morgan

Catholics get on well with tyranny. It's in the culture. — Richard K. Morgan

DISAPPOINTMENT IS A SLOW POISON. — Richard K. Morgan

You thought perhaps you would drink it away, the plague? Was that the plan?"

"I thought perhaps I'd try to die drunk."

"Such ambition. And this from a dragon-slayer. — Richard K. Morgan

You'll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don't have to think for themselves. — Richard K. Morgan

Well than try giving it some thought, why don't you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack
you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat's-paw? — Richard K. Morgan

They're brutal, moronic, they have the ethical consciousness of apes and the initiative levels of sheep. But you took the field against the reptiles for them nonetheless. Why?" Ringil — Richard K. Morgan

There's a general hate in the hearts of men. You went to war, Gil, you should know that better than anyone. It's like the heat of the sun. Men like Kaad are just the focal figures, like lenses to gather the sun's rays on kindling. You can smash a lens, but that won't put out the sun. — Richard K. Morgan

You smoke?"
"Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot? — Richard K. Morgan

From a legal point of view - " He shook his head. "Forget the law. It isn't going to help. They'll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn't. They're clerics, Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage. — Richard K. Morgan

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don't, then the agenda makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay. QUELLCRIST — Richard K. Morgan

And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn. — Richard K. Morgan

If they asked how I died tell them: Still angry. — Richard K. Morgan

There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who - other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily - still told those? — Richard K. Morgan

I said - do you want to kill a fucking dragon?" More yells, and more punch behind them this time. Egar eased up out of his crouch and filled his lungs. "I can't hear you! Do you - or do you not - want to kill - a motherfucking dragon? — Richard K. Morgan

Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have. — Richard K. Morgan

Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving. — Richard K. Morgan

Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about. — Richard K. Morgan

If you don't know the men at your back by name, don't be surprised if they won't follow you into battle. On the other hand, don't be surprised if they will, either, because there are countless other factors you must take into account. Leadership is a slippery commodity, not easily manufactured or understood. — Richard K. Morgan

Take what is offered and that must sometimes be enough. — Richard K. Morgan

When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him. — Richard K. Morgan

We're more than what we do. — Richard K. Morgan

Worse fates than being forced into a place where your choice of acts is limited to those where your soul burns brightest. — Richard K. Morgan

Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the drug-like grip of a decision taken and what it meant. — Richard K. Morgan

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile. — Richard K. Morgan

Ringil lifted his right hand as if it pained him, put it slowly and wonderingly up to his shoulder and touched the pommel of his sword like, well, like he was caressing someone's prick, to be honest. — Richard K. Morgan

Reality is so flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless distinction. — Richard K. Morgan

It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark wood corridor, it was a life he might have had in Yhelteth if disgust and fury had not sent him away in disgrace instead. It was the slaves he could not free, the screaming women and children of Ennishmin he could not save, the piled-up, silent dead and the smashed-in, ruined homes. It was every wrong decision he'd ever made, every path he'd failed to walk, fanned out and held up for him to understand, and it hurt. — Richard K. Morgan

'Syndicate' is technically the first game I worked on. — Richard K. Morgan

In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time. — Richard K. Morgan

Potential, and the will to deploy it. That's all magic is in the end, you know. — Richard K. Morgan

They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team. — Richard K. Morgan

I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed. — Richard K. Morgan

It's amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with. — Richard K. Morgan