Top 15 Fritz Leiber Quotes

“You’ve got to believe there’s some sort of sense in everything that crazies say.”
“Crazies?”
“All of us.”

What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end.

I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence.

Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest the highest test of the truth of anything. I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords—those are true—and some do not, and those are merely bad art.

I am up to date only sporadically. I live firmly in the world of art, where reality and fantasy are one.

It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did.

You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.

Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a God, her name is Mystery.

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence — liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.

The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils.

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.

Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.

The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence.

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age’s vaunted ‘communications industry’ had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.