Roger Zelazny Quotes

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

~ Roger Zelazny

Nobody steals books but your friends.

~ Roger Zelazny

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago.

~ Roger Zelazny

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

~ 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

I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.

~ Roger Zelazny

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

~ Roger Zelazny

It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.

~ 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

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

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

When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.

~ 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

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.' Sam held out his hand. Give me some tobacco and a paper.

~ Roger Zelazny

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.

~ Roger Zelazny

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.

~ Roger Zelazny

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

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

~ Roger Zelazny

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.

~ Roger Zelazny

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

~ Roger Zelazny

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

~ Roger Zelazny

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown....To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three.

~ 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

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

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck.

~ Roger Zelazny

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend.

~ Roger Zelazny

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?

~ Roger Zelazny

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

~ Roger Zelazny

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.

~ Roger Zelazny

I have no objection to the expression of political opinions in SF if they are an integral part of the story structure. I don't at all appreciate their intrusion for the purpose of converting a story into a political tract, because I consider that intellectually insulting.

~ 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

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

~ Roger Zelazny

Wheels turning, the motorcycle’s roar grows steady, which, too, is a form of silence.

~ Roger Zelazny

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

~ 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

You are a fool to speak of last great battles, Sam, for the last great battle is always the next one.

~ 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

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when don't want them to.

~ 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

Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.

~ Roger Zelazny