Roger Zelazny Quotes & Sayings

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. — Roger Zelazny

Time, too, is a function of Shadow, and even Dworkin did not know all of its ins and outs. Or perhaps he did. Maybe that is what drove him mad. — Roger Zelazny

We fought.'
'A duel?'
'Nothing that formal. A simultaneous decision to murder one another is more like it. — Roger Zelazny

If it will give you any satisfaction in the end, I still care for you. Either there is no such thing as love, or the word does not mean what I have thought it to mean on many different occasions. It is a feeling without a name, really - better to leave it at that. So take it and go away and have your fun with it. You know that we would both be at one another's throats again one day, as soon as we run out of common enemies. We had many fine reconciliations, but were they ever worth the pain that preceded them? Know that you have won and that you are the goddess I worship - for are not worship and religious awe a combination of love and hate, desire and fear? — Roger Zelazny

But I recall the springtime of the world as though it were yesterday - those days when we rode together to battle, and those nights when we shook the stars loose from the fresh-painted skies! — Roger Zelazny

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

There is Shadow and there is Substance, and this is the root of all things. Of Substance, there is only Amber, the real city, upon the real Earth, which contains everything. Of Shadow, there is an infinitude of things. Every possibility exists somewhere as a Shadow of the real. — Roger Zelazny

Death is mighty, and is no one's friend. — Roger Zelazny

While suggesting you repent, prophets very seldom predict the wrath of the gods in terms of landslides and hurricanes. No. Floods and fires are what you get for the rottenness of your ways. Primitive man was really on his way when he learned to kindle the one and had enough of the other nearby to put it out. — Roger Zelazny

Two versions of the same face looking into blank screens, two very different minds thinking of things unsaid. Sometimes love is in silence. — Roger Zelazny

P.S. I still dunno if it's art. Go to Hell yourself. — Roger Zelazny

In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay ... — Roger Zelazny

I have always found that hell is other people. — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace. — Roger Zelazny

You who are dead ... tonight you will disport yourselves for my pleasure. Food and wine will pass between your dead lips, though you will not taste it. Your dead stomachs will hold it within you, while your dead feet take the measure of a dance. Your dead mouths will speak words that will have no meaning to you, and you will embrace one another without pleasure. You will sing for me if I wish it. You will lie down again when I will it ... Let the revelry begin. — Roger Zelazny

Heredity or environment? I wondered wryly. We were all of us, to some degree, mad after his fashion. To be honest, it had to be a form of madness, to have so much and to strive so bitterly for just a little more, for a bit of an edge over the others. He carried this tendency to its extreme, that is all. He was a caricature of this mania in all of us. In this sense, did it really matter which of us was the traitor? — Roger Zelazny

Which one is the right way?"
"Huh? You're asking me that? How should I know?"
"Mortals call you Buddha."
"That is only because they are afflicted with language and ignorance. — Roger Zelazny

The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls. — Roger Zelazny

The thing had been quite unpremeditated on my part. I had not even thought of her as a woman until she came into my arms and revised my thinking on the subject. — Roger Zelazny

Vishnu Vishnu Vishnu regarded regarded regarded Brahma Brahma Brahma ...
They sat in the Hall of Mirrors. — Roger Zelazny

Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don't know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?
In the invisible city?
Inside me?
It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.
There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all. — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

The stars blazed like the love of God, cold and distant. — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen. — Roger Zelazny

After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent. — Roger Zelazny

Once past the comfort zone in either direction, humans soon lost the ability to discriminate bad from worse. — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

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

And sweets to the sweet, I replied, then spoke the word that completed the spell, dropping a load of manure upon him. — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

I worked out a book which I thought was just straight science fiction
with everything pretty much explained, and suddenly I got an idea which I thought was kind of neat for working in a mythological angle. I'm really struggling with myself. It would probably be a better book if I include it, but on the other hand I don't always like to keep reverting to it. I think what I'm going to do is vary my output, do some straight science fiction and some straight fantasy that doesn't involve mythology, and composites. — Roger Zelazny

Time means a lot to me, paperwork wastes it, and I have always been a firm believer in my right to do anything I cannot be stopped from doing. Which sometimes entails not getting caught at it. This is not quite so bad as it sounds, as I am a decent, civilized, likable guy. So, shading my eyes against the blue and fiery afternoon, I began searching for ways to convince the authorities of this. Lying, I decided, was probably best. — Roger Zelazny

As I sailed into Shadow, a white bird of my desire came and sat upon my right shoulder, and I wrote a note and tied it to its leg and set it on its way. The note said "I am coming," and it was signed by me.
A black bird of my desire came and sat upon my left shoulder, and I wrote a note and tied it to its leg and sent it off into the west. It said, "Eric- I'll be back," and it was signed: Corwin, Lord of Amber.
A demon wind propelled me east of the sun. — Roger Zelazny

Later, much later, I was to see this for the rationalization it was; my real reason for denying her the answers she desired was that I was not ready to trust her, or anyone, so close to me as I really am.
Had I known her longer, better
another year, say
I might have answered her. I don't know. We never used the word "love," though it must have run through her mind on occasion, as it did through mine. It was, I suppose, that I didn't love her enough to trust her, and then it was too late. So, "I can't tell you," were my words. — Roger Zelazny

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

Nobody steals books but your friends. — Roger Zelazny

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

What an enormous chutzpah you possess," I told him. "What makes you better than the rest of us, and more fit to rule?" "The fact that I was able to occupy the throne," he replied. "Try and take it. — Roger Zelazny

When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all. — Roger Zelazny

I was willing to die fighting, but it was senseless for all these men to go down with me. Perhaps my blood was tainted, despite my power over the Pattern. A true prince of Amber should have had no such qualms. I decided then that my centuries on the Shadow Earth had changed me, softened me perhaps, had done something to me which made me unlike my brothers. — Roger Zelazny

I loved him like a brother - which is to say, not at all. — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

You were correct, for all men have within them both that which is dark and that which is light.
A man is a thing of many divisions, not a pure, clear flame such as you once were. His intellect often wars with his emotions, his will with his desires ...
his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that
which was old, but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and noble dream.
Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure. Always he mourns that
which is gone and fears some part of that which is new. Reason opposes tradition. Emotions oppose the
restrictions his fellow men lay upon him. Always, from the friction of these things, there arises the
thing you called the curse of man and mocked; guilt! — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

Be warned, therefore, that one does not go to hell to light a cigarette. — Roger Zelazny

Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'
A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'
You enjoy this duty?'
He nodded.
I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here. — Roger Zelazny

A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky high, tires assailing the road below like four phantom buzzsaws - and starting from scratch and ending in the same place, and never knowing where you are going or where you have been - it is possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling of individuality in the coldest brainpan, to produce a momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all but a sense of motion. This is because movement through darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itself - at least that's what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the place laughed. — Roger Zelazny

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

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

I wonder as to the value of consciousness," said Jack, "if it does not change the nature of a beast. — Roger Zelazny

My mind spun for a second before it drifted, and in that second I knew that of all pleasures a drink of cold water when you are thirsty, liquor when you are not, sex, a cigarette after many days without one there is none of them can compare with sleep. Sleep is best ... — Roger Zelazny

Wheels turning, the motorcycle's roar grows steady, which, too, is a form of silence. — Roger Zelazny

Angel of the Forsaken Hope
Wielder of the Sword of Wind and Obsidian
Slice the Algorithms from our Foe.

Mermaid Beneath the Seven Dancing Moons,
Cantress of the Siren Song,
Drown our Enemies in the Data-stream.

Nymph of the Logic Tree,
Child of the First Word,
Give our Antagonist to Grief. — Roger Zelazny

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. — Roger Zelazny

What should I do?' Coyote yelled.
'Cultivate philosophy and run like hell,' said Bear ... — Roger Zelazny

I believe everything I say, though I know I'm a liar. — Roger Zelazny

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

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

Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see. — Roger Zelazny

I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not
so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will. — Roger Zelazny

Then the fit hit the Shan. — Roger Zelazny

The headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse. — Roger Zelazny

The Keeper of Clouds has unpenned his charges.
The Keeper of Winds has unlocked his gates.
The Keeper of Waters has opened the sky.
The Keeper of Lightnings waves his lances.
The Keeper of satellites has observed,
'One hundred percent of probability of precipitation. — Roger Zelazny

Then every man would be as a god, you see. The result of this, of course, would be that there would no longer be any gods, only men. We would give them knowledge of the sciences and the arts, which we possess, and in so doing we would destroy their simple faith and remove all basis for their hoping that things will be better - for the best way to destroy faith or hope is to let it be realized. — Roger Zelazny

Hell, we make our own ifs. I had better things to think about than what could have happened — Roger Zelazny

First, a man may in some ways be superior to his fellows and still serve them, if together they serve a common cause which is greater than any one man. I believe that I serve such a cause, or I would not be doing it. — Roger Zelazny

Any man would be forsworn to gain a kingdom. — Roger Zelazny

The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also. — Roger Zelazny

No airplane could make it. Not since the war. None could venture above a couple hundred feet, the place where the winds began. The winds: the mighty winds that circled the globe, tearing off the tops of mountains and sequoia trees, wrecked buildings, gathered up birds, bats, insects, and anything else that moved, up into the dead belt; the winds that swirled about the world, lacing the skies with dark lines of debris, occasionally meeting, merging, clashing, dropping tons of rubbish wherever they came together and formed too great a mass. Air transportation was definitely out, to anywhere in the world, for these winds circled, and they never ceased. Not in all the twenty-five years of Tanner's memory had they let up. Tanner — Roger Zelazny

And the man clad in black and silver with a silver rose upon him? He would like to think that he has learned something of trust, that he has washed his eyes in some clear spring, that he has polished an ideal or two. Never Mind. He may still be only a smart-mouthed meddler, skilled mainly in the minor art of survival, blind as ever the dungeons knew him to the finer shades of irony. Never mind, let it go, let it be. I may never be pleased with him. — Roger Zelazny

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. — Roger Zelazny

I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar. — Roger Zelazny

Are you going to do it?" he asked. "Maybe," I said.
Don't 'maybe' me, baby. It's written all over you. I'd almost be willing to go along, you know. Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least."
I lit a cigarette, while I considered. — Roger Zelazny

I decided that mankind could live better without gods. If I disposed of them all, people could start having can openers and cans to open again, and things like that, without fearing the wrath of Heaven. We've stepped on these poor fools enough. I wanted to give them a chance to be free, to build what they wanted. — Roger Zelazny

I would never rest until I held vengeance and the throne within my hand, and good night sweet prince to anybody who stood between me and these things. — Roger Zelazny

Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. — Roger Zelazny

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene. — Roger Zelazny

You are a deviant from the social norm!"
"Is that an insult or a diagnosis? — Roger Zelazny

All roads lead to Amber, he said, as though it were an axiom. — Roger Zelazny

In a world of physical ease, brutal social equality, and reasonable economic equality, exclusiveness in frivolity becomes the most sought-after of all distinctions. — Roger Zelazny

Ill met by moonlight,' said Deirdre.
'You could still be tied to a stake,' said Random, and she did not reply. — Roger Zelazny

Beware the meek ... for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth. — Roger Zelazny

He spent the last second of his life screaming, as the force of Bortan's leap pulped him against the ground, before his head was snatched from his shoulders.
My hellhound had arrived. — Roger Zelazny

It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart - never the sensation of the moment. — Roger Zelazny

Such
times are rare, such times are fleeting, but always bright when caught, measured, hung, and later regarded
in times of adversity, there in the kinder halls of memory, against the flapping of the flames. — Roger Zelazny

Most people who daydream of transforming themselves into some vicious beast and going about tearing people's throats out, dismembering them, disfiguring them and perhaps devouring them tend mainly to dwell upon how much fun it would be and generally neglect the practicalities of the situation. — Roger Zelazny

Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least. — Roger Zelazny

Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent. — Roger Zelazny

There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes. — Roger Zelazny

I took Jack his slippers this evening and lay at his feet before a roaring fire while he smoked his pipe, sipped sherry, and read the newspaper. He read aloud everything involving killings, arsons, mutilations, grave robberies, church desecrations, and unusual thefts. It is very pleasant just being domestic sometimes. — Roger Zelazny

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

If I get enough letters saying you never explained this or that, I suppose I'll have to write another book. — Roger Zelazny

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

Trouble can be purchased cheaply, though the refund may be more than you can bear. — Roger Zelazny

Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own. — Roger Zelazny

Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you. ~Hasan~ — Roger Zelazny

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert. — Roger Zelazny

I have a better idea,' said she. 'Know that under a mortal name am I mistress of the Palace of Kama in Khaipur.'
'The Fornicatorium, madam?'
She frowned. 'As such is it often known to the vulgar, and do not call me 'madam' in the same breath
it smacks of ancient jest. It is a place of rest, pleasure, holiness and much of my revenue. — Roger Zelazny