R. Scott Bakker Quotes

I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.

Why break hearts or blow minds when you can rot souls?

Give me an arm long enough, and I will reach across the universe and punch myself in the back of the head. Not because I deserve it, but because I can take it.

It is no accident that fantasy is preoccupied with our pre-Enlightenment, pre-crisis past. The contemporary world is a nihilistic world, where all signs point to the illusory status of love, beauty, goodness and so on. ... Fantasy is the celebration of what we no longer are: individuals certain of our meaningfulness in a meaningful world. The wish-fulfillment that distinguishes fantasy from other genres is not to be the all-conquering hero, but to live in a meaningful world.

A beggar’s mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king’s mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.

Every monumental work of the State is measured by cubits. Every cubit is measured by the length of the Aspect-Emperor’s arm. And the Aspect-Emperor’s arm, they say, stands beyond measure. But I say the Aspect-Emperor’s arm is measured by the length of a cubit, and that all cubits are measured by the works of the State. Not even the All stands beyond measure, for it is more than what lies within it, and “more” is a kind of measure. Even the God has His cubits.

I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.

If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery?

In part, The Prince of Nothing is about the dialogue between these two species of faith, the one that identifies itself with doubt and remains open to the superunknown, the other that identifies itself with certainty and remains blind to the superunknown. It shows how empowered, how manipulable, and how dangerous we become when we think we possess an absolute yardstick.

I write about the death of magic. All of it.

... science, being science, can only wage total war. No traditional discourse has survived the scientific rationalization of their domain. All of them have been reduced to hokum, expelled from the courts, hounded from policy, from rationality altogether, and relegated to fantasy, which is to say, become commodities sold to balm the superstitious soul.

The difference between the critic and the apologist in philosophy is the difference between conceiving philosophy as refuge, a post hoc means to rationalize and so recuperate what we cherish or require, and conceiving philosophy as exposure, an ad hoc means to mutate thought and so see our way through what we think we cherish or require. ... To truly expose thought is to be willing to let it die… Or become inhuman.

To believe in meaning of any sort is to have faith in some version of ‘God.’ Finite or infinite, mortal or immortal, the intentional form is conserved–and as I hope to show, that form is supernatural.

Consciousness is something hooked across the top of your nose, like glasses, only as thick as the cosmos.

Johnston's picture of intentionally rising from the cracks and gaps of an intrinsically contradictory reality happens to be the very ontological trope I use to structure the fantasy world of The Second Apocalypse! The ontological formula he hopes will force change on science is the same ontological formula I use to identify my fiction as fantasy fiction. One of my goals in my epic fantasy series is to demonstrate the seamless nature of the fit between Continental philosophical concepts and magical realities, to explore the affinities one finds in theological and new age appropriations of Continental conceptualities. To show the degree to which humanistic discourse belongs to prescientific cultural ecologies, and so examine the inevitability of its obsolescence.