Roger Zelazny Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
Why do you tell me this?
Perhaps because I am a cat and it amuses me to be arbitrary and do you a good turn.

Roger Zelazny
"It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game."
"I am pleased that you were not wholly bored," Martin said. "Now will you tell me what you were talking about concerning the destruction of my species?"
"Oh, that," Tlingel replied.

Roger Zelazny