Richard K Quotes & Sayings

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

In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. — 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

I stop and think what they call 'punk rock' today ... give me a break! Let me know when they can walk in the vapor trail of Little Richard, which was punk. You've got a gay black guy with a pompadour singing about tutti frutti with your white girl? F-k you! — Ted Nugent

Ringil, preparing to hand out some straightforward reassurance, felt mischief sparkle through him instead. It was the call of impending risk, he knew, the itch to action - and a long building irritation with Nyanar that finally flared to life. He put on a breezy grin. But my lord Nyanar! That's what gives life its savor, is it not? Where would we be if the future were always known? — Richard K. Morgan

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death. — Richard K. Morgan

I let Richard walk out on me. I think he'd have gone anyway, but I just sat on the floor and watched him go. I didn't stand in his way. I figured it was his choice, and you cant hold someone if they don't want to be held. If someone really wants to be free of you, you have to let them go. Well, fuck that, fuck that all to hell. Don't go, Asher, please, don't go. I love the way your hair shines in the light. I love that way you smile when you're not trying to hide or impress anyone. I love your laughter. I love the way your voice can hold sorrow like the taste of rain. I love the way you watch Jean-Claude when he moves through a room, when you don't think anyone's watching, because its exactly the way I watch him. I love your eyes. I love your pain. I love you. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita can speak for herself," Richard said.
Jean-Claude's attention flicked back to me. "That is certainly true. But I came to see how the two of you enjoyed the play."
"And pigs fly," I said.
"You don't believe me?"
"Not hardly," I said. — Laurell K. Hamilton

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

A weapon is a tool," she repeated, a little breathlessly. "A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension
you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them. — Richard K. Morgan

A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one. — Richard K. Morgan

He pulled up a chair and sat down by the bed, smiling at me. It was a nice smile. "So you're a werewolf." He nodded. "How did it happen?" He stared down at the floor, then up. His face looked so solemn, I was sorry I'd asked. I was expecting some great tale of a savage attack survived. "I got a bad batch of lycanthropy serum." "You what?" "You heard me." He seemed embarrassed. "You got a bad shot?" "Yes." My smile got wider and wider. "It's not funny," he said. I shook my head. "Not at all." I knew my eyes were shiny, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud. "You've got to admit it's nicely ironic." He sighed. "You're going to hurt yourself. Go ahead and laugh." I did. I laughed until it hurt, and Richard joined in. Laughter is contagious, too. — Laurell K. Hamilton

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

Books - the warm, leather-skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face. The unfeasibly heart-jolting shock once, as a tome fell heavily open at some much-visited page, divided itself neatly in two blocky halves along the spine - and you thought, guiltily, that you'd broken it. — 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

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

Richard either didn't hear me, or chose to ignore it. Smart, handsome, junior high science teacher, degree in preternatural biology, what more could i ask for? Give me a minute and I'd think of something. — Laurell K. Hamilton

The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby. I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don't remember the first time I saw him. — Louis C.K.

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

You know God does not manifest Himself," Halgan shouted. "That is also heresy. The Revelation is not corporeal. You know this. Why do you persist in this perverted speech?"
"I like perverted. Maybe you would, too, if you gave it a chance."
"Leave my men alone," Rakan said coldly. "Degenerate."
Ringil smooched a kiss at him. — Richard K. Morgan

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

Forget uniforms or nominal allegiances - if it wears a weapon and scars, it's no safer than the next starving wild dog. Feed and water with care, walk like you're carrying dragon eggs, and never, never get between rival packs. — Richard K. Morgan

Make it personal. — Richard K. Morgan

The truthfulness of 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' is in doubt largely because of uncertainty about its authorship, and, as we have seen, a nearly identical ambiguity surrounds the Appendix. The parallel is significant. Two psychologically oriented critics, Murray Sperber and J. Brooks Bouson, have each pointed out strong resemblances between O'Brien's manipulation of Winston and Orwell's manipulation of the reader. I believe these resemblances extend to the book's handling of its two principal documents. Just as O'Brien plays upon Winston's desire for certain knowledge about Oceania's social and political structure, leading him on with the possibly spurious 'Goldstein' tract, so the story's narrator draws the truth-seeking reader into an Appendix whose truth value cannot be determined. — Richard K. Sanderson

The unspoken thing, the forbidden hope, the one point that made David's service feel like servitude because he could not even ask. But Lord Richard still wasn't moving, his deep blue eyes locked on David's and wide with shock, and now they knew. Now they both knew and there was no pretending otherwise. — K.J. Charles

He came to me then, wrapped his arms around me. I stayed stiff in his arms for a moment, and then I collapsed into his body. I clung to him. I let his strength and his nearness hold me. I let him hold me while I wept and screamed and wailed. I lost it completely, and Richard held me while I did it. — Laurell K. Hamilton

About the blood; it isn't yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you'll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don't worry about wounds; check your functionality. — Richard K. Morgan

He'd already made her for Kiriath and was backing off like a poet asked to wash dishes. Ringil — Richard K. Morgan

I started to say something, but Richard said, "Come on, Anita. We have to go now." He was right. I could kill a lot of them, but not all. I hadn't brought a spare clip for the machine gun. I hadn't thought I'd need it. Silly me. We — Laurell K. Hamilton

You can't talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on. — Richard K. Morgan

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. — 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

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

Richard has informed me he is shopping for his white picket fence. I'm happy behind my black wrought iron fence. The one with the pointy spikes on top. White never really was my color. — Laurell K. Hamilton

His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse's. — Richard K. Morgan

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

The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a ruined world ... — Richard Preston

It wasn't just my beast's hunger, but Jean-Claude's blood thirst and Richard's craving for flesh. It was all that and the ardeur running through all of it, so that one hunger fed into the next in an endless chain, a snake eating it's own tail, an Ouroboros of desires. — Laurell K. Hamilton

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

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

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

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

I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works. — 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

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

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

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

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

So all the rest is O.K., but fame is a hollow ground, isn't it? It's an empty kind of thing. — Richard O'Brien

Well." Ringil gave the Throne Eternal captain another brittle little smile. "You know, the thing about fucking is, it's a lot less wear and tear than trying to kill each other with bits of steel. And it's the sort of thing that does tend to lead to confidences and favours if you play it right. Ask any woman, she'll tell you that. Unless of course your experiences in that direction are limited, as, come to think of it, yours probably are, to whores and rape. — 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

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

Richard stood, running his fingers through his thick hair, getting it out of his face, and showing his chest off to good advantage. For the first time, I wondered if he'd done it on purpose. I searched his face for that edge of teasing that Jean-Claude had, that knowledge that even that simple movement touched me. There was nothing. Richard's face was guileless, handsome, empty of ulterior motives. I exchanged glances with Jean-Claude. He shrugged. "If you do not understand him, do not look to me. I am not in love with him." Richard looked puzzled. "Did I miss something? — Laurell K. Hamilton

We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn't hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be? — Richard K. Morgan

Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere. — 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

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

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

DISAPPOINTMENT IS A SLOW POISON. — Richard K. Morgan

There are no alternatives. You live with what is. And you don't let your ghosts rent room in your head. — Richard K. Morgan

When I was younger, I did a TV show in the U.K. for a couple years, and I learned a lot from that. It taught me a lot about being known amongst your peers and having to deal with a lot of derision from them. — Richard Madden

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

His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town. — 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

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

I am home, you soggy-faced, entitled little prick, he barely stopped himself saying. You think it took northern sorcery to make me the way I am now? You think it took a war? Those things were tonic compared to what came before. Desperation and deception were waiting for me at the nursery door, took me by either hand as I walked out into my youth, have been my constant companions since. — Richard K. Morgan

I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats. There — 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

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

No way. You won't catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you. — Richard K. Morgan

You know nothing of me." Through clenched teeth. "Nothing. You've fucked me, that's all. Well, that's a crowded hole you're in, darling. And us humans, we're a lying, dissembling bunch, remember. Doesn't pay to trust us between the sheets any more than anywhere else. — Richard K. Morgan

The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet. — 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

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

Culture is like a smog. To live
within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be
contaminated. — 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

I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors," Ringil recited for him, hollowly. "I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave. — Richard K. Morgan

You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. they reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It's the axiomatic truth of our times. — Richard K. Morgan

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

At least I'm not dead.
That can be remedied.
Jean-Claude & Richard — Laurell K. Hamilton

South Africa had very poor repertory distribution. I didn't find out about Akira Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Werner Herzog until I got to the U.K. — Richard Stanley

Richard couldn't adorn David's ears with jewels and doubted very much he'd want them. Even the plainest gifts would be attention-grabbing, inappropriate, dangerous. Richard would just have to give his valet the world instead. — K.J. Charles

He balled his hand into a fist. "You are such a bitch." "Woof, woof," I said. — Laurell K. Hamilton

A moment later Jonathan's body wavered in the air, shimmering, and began to go transparent. Don't let them spread silly rumors about me, or make me a god. O.K., Fletch? I'm a seagull. I like to fly, maybe ... — Richard Bach

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