Michael Moorcock Quotes

It is many years since I have wielded a weapon larger than a pen, borne anything weightier than a difficult problem in philosophy.

And is adventure and sensation all we should seek, Meliadus?"
"Aye—why not? All is chaos, there is no meaning to existence, there is only one advantage to living one's life and that is to discover all the sensations the human mind and body is capable of feeling.

Every court must have its fool, every great ideal must attract some who are motivated only by self-interest.

And then he pursed his lips in disgust. “Doubtless that was the result of supernatural interference with our brains! How I hate the supernatural!”

I think you serve a great purpose, Hawkmoon. I think your destiny is a noble one."
Hawkmoon laughed. "And yet I do not pine for a noble destiny—merely a secure one.

“I have heard it said it is often safer to dwell in the lion’s lair than outside it,” Oladahn said.
“Safer still to live in a land where there are no lions,” Count Brass retorted.

Machine-devoured, all his hours were given o’er to that insidious circuitry, and old grew he, unnoticing, in the service of his engines.

Wild days, wild riders, and the stink of warfare across the world!

Only Bowgentle, the philosopher-poet, his old friend, had an inkling of what he meant and even then Bowgentle believed that it reflected not on the nature of the landscape but on the particular nature of Count Brass’s mind.
“You’re exhausted, disorientated,” Bowgentle would say. “The ordering mechanism of the brain is working too hard, so you see a pattern to existence that, in fact, only stems from your own weariness and disturbance...”

For this was the great power of the Lords of the Dark Empire, that they valued nothing on all the Earth, no human quality, nothing within or without themselves. The spreading of conquest and desolation, of terror and torment, was their staple entertainment, a means of employing their hours until their spans of life were ended. For them, warfare was merely the most satisfactory way of easing their ennui...

No denial would convince you," D'Averc smiled, "so I will not offer you one.

The hardest compromise to make is when you decide to appear to compromise. Often the deception becomes the reality long before you realize it.

I would waste my rhetoric if I tried, for men are greedy and will not see the truth for the gleam of coin.

Do not thank me for saving your life. You do not realize yet what I have saved it for.

“I shall not be killed!” The count smiled scornfully, as if death were something that only others suffered.