Roger Zelazny Quotes

Every now and then it's nice to stop and just look over what you've been writing and the way you've been writing it and sort of reassess it, and see if you've fallen into bad habits or there's something you'd like to get better at. One way of reexamining your own work is to work with somebody else. It's a learning experience. I don't want to get into a rut.

"And the secret is," I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, "he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hubris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us."

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.

"Everything that's miserable in the world," Nick the dwarf once said to me, "is because of beauty."
"Not truth or goodness?" I'd asked.
"Oh, they help. But beauty is the culprit, the real principle of evil."
"Not wealth?"
"Money is beautiful."

I decided that the devil finds work for idle hands and thanked him for his suggestion.

From the shape of a cloud I know that a man in a distant city will quarrel with his wife three seasons hence and a murderer will be hanged before I finish speaking. From the falling of a stone I know the number of maidens being seduced and the movements of icebergs on the other side of the world. From the texture of the wind I know where next the lightning will fall. So long have I watched and so much am I part of all things, that nothing is hidden from me."
"You know where I go?"
"Yes."
"And what I would do there?"
"I know that, too."
"Then tell me if you know, will I succeed in that which I desire?"
"You will succeed in that which you are about, but by then it may not be what you desire."
"I do not understand you, Morningstar."
"I know that, too. But that is the way it is with all oracles, Jack. When that which is foreseen comes to pass, the inquirer is no longer the same person he was when he posed the question. It is impossible to make a man understand what he will become with the passage of time; and it is only a future self to whom a prophecy is truly relevant."

Death is the only limit to the road you travel.

It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart — never the sensation of the moment.

Oh, cynical monger of indulgences! ’Twould take a man of the cloth to work a scheme like that!

Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.

The days that followed were a game I enjoyed playing. Fake indecision is delicious when people want you to do something.

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.

True epics of course are few and historically well spaced, but that slightly more mundane ingredient, the speculative impulse, be it of Classic, Christian or Renaissance shading, which ornamented Western literature with romances, fables, exotic voyages and utopias, seemed to me basically the same turn of fancy exercised today in science fiction, working then with the only objects available to it. It took the Enlightenment, it took science, it took the industrial revolution to provide new sources of idea that, pushed, poked, inverted and rotated through higher spaces, resulted in science fiction. When the biggest, the most interesting ideas began emerging from science, rather than from theology or the exploration of new lands, hindsight makes it seem logical that something like science fiction had to be delivered.

Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don't know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?

In the invisible city?

Inside me?

It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.

There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.

Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.