Roger Zelazny Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Roger Zelazny
"I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally. It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek tenor sax play at sunset."

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

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

Roger Zelazny
Cute, she said, smiling. If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

Roger Zelazny
I decided that the devil finds work for idle hands and thanked him for his suggestion.

Roger Zelazny
An ellipse is fine for as far as it goes, But modesty, away! If I'm going to see Beauty without her clothes Give me hyperbolas any old day.

Roger Zelazny
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.

Roger Zelazny
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.

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
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
I got the idea for that story in May of 1979. I didn't know what it was going to be; I just thought it would be neat to write something about Jack the Ripper's dog, and ask Gahan Wilson to illustrate it, partly because of the fact that a dog is such an unusual person. No matter who owns a dog, if that person is nice to the animal, the dog is going to love him. I thought at the time, if you take a really despicable person, a serial killer or someone like that, and tell a story from his dog's point of view it would make him look pretty good.

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

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
Every now and then it's nice to stop and just look over what you've been writing and the way you've been writing it and sort of reassess it, and see if you've fallen into bad habits or there's something you'd like to get better at. One way of reexamining your own work is to work with somebody else. It's a learning experience. I don't want to get into a rut.

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

Roger Zelazny
Nick swore he'd die with this boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kilimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they'd cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he'd picked up in the hospital. That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I'd been a pallbearer.

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

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
Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future.

Roger Zelazny
Times have changed since the Good Book was written, and you can't hold with a purely Fundamentalist approach in complex times.

Roger Zelazny
I had troubles of my own, and even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.

Roger Zelazny
On the water, aboard the Proteus, the crowding, the activities, the tempo, of life in the cities, on the land, are muted, slowed—fictionalized—by the metaphysical distancing a few meters of water can provide. We alter the landscape with great facility, but the ocean has always seemed unchanged, and I suppose by extension we are infected with some feelings of timelessness whenever we set out upon her.

Roger Zelazny
Nothing we did in those days has caused a change.
Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse, I told him.

Roger Zelazny
At the end of the season of sorrows comes the time of rejoicing. Spring, like a well-oiled clock, noiselessly indicates this time.

Roger Zelazny