Roger Zelazny Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
All of these things considered, it is not surprising that one can detect echoes, correspondences and even an eternal return or two within the work of a single author. The passage of time does bring changes, yea and alas; but still, I would recognize myself anywhere.

Roger Zelazny
When you talk about being an 'anticipator,' of having a pretty good idea of when something's going to happen—or how, or who will be there—isn't that a kind of divination?
No. I think it's more a kind of subconscious knack for dealing with statistics, against a fairly well-known field of actions.

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

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
Well, I decided that as a teenager that I really didn't know enough to describe character well and I was wasting my time. I'd learned as much as I could about story telling techniques and it wasn't a matter of technique any more. It was a matter of substance. As a result I said I was going to wait until I was a lot older and had more experience. So it was that after I got out of college I'd been away from SF for about four years. I'd read SF steadily from when I was eleven until I started college. When I started college I said, "I'm not going to read that while I'm here, I'm going to learn poetry and other things of that sort" in fact I wrote a lot of poetry then.

Roger Zelazny
He flowed. Away from all the rooms of the world. Away from the stifling lack of intensity, from the day's hundred spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of forced amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.
And as he fled down the run he felt a strong desire to look back over his shoulder, as though to see whether the world he had left behind and above had set one fearsome embodiment of itself, like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down, and to drag hem back to a warm and well-it coffin in the sky, there to be laid to rest with a spike of aluminum driven through his will and a garland of alternating currents smothering his spirit.

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
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
Two days like icebergs—bleak, blank, half-melting, all frigid, mainly out of sight, and definitely a threat to peace of mind—drifted by and were good to put behind.

Roger Zelazny
Never trust a cat, anyway. All they're good for is stringing tennis racquets.

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
The power to hurt... has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.

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
Beware, she recited a personal beatitude, those who hunger and thirst after justice, for we will be satisfied.
And beware the meek, she continued, for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth.

Roger Zelazny
"Could Yarl the Omnipotent create a stone so heavy he couldn't lift it?" asked Green Green.
"No," replied Courtcour.
"Why not?"
"He wouldn't."
"That's no answer."
"Yes, it is. Think about it. Would you?"

Roger Zelazny
It is a city of neat cottages and cobbled streets where wander cats without number, for the enlightened legislators of long ago laid down laws for our protection. A good, kind village, where travelers take their ease and pet the cats, making much of them, which is as it should 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
It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.

Roger Zelazny
You don't know what it's like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience something you can never know — and that he cannot appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological happenstance, in a place where there is no justice — only fortuity, pure and simple.

Roger Zelazny
Oh, I don't know — that's a hell of a question — I don't tend to look at my stuff that way. I just look at it a book at a time. Something like the Amber books are in a different class. I try not to anticipate. I don't know what I'll be writing a few years from now. I have some ideas — I have lots of different things I want to try. I almost don't really care what history thinks. I like the way I'm being treated right now.

Roger Zelazny
The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

Roger Zelazny
I wasn't disappointed, inasmuch as I expected nothing.

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

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
A bizarrerie of fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest nature — swirl of black ashes assembled in prancing cadence to the lowing note of desert wind down the arroyo behind buildings as empty yet filled as the pages of unread books or stillnesses between the notes of a song.

Roger Zelazny
I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

Roger Zelazny
I walked among Shadows, and found a race of furry creatures, dark and clawed and fanged, reasonably manlike, and about as intelligent as a freshman in the high school of your choice-sorry, kids, but what I mean is they were loyal, devoted, honest, and too easily screwed by bastards like me and my brother. I felt like the dee-jay of your choice.

Roger Zelazny
The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.

Roger Zelazny