Roger Zelazny

Nobody steals books but your friends.

— Roger Zelazny

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.

— Roger Zelazny

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

— Roger Zelazny

At the end of the season of sorrows comes the time of rejoicing. Spring, like a well-oiled clock, noiselessly indicates this time.

— Roger Zelazny

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant — you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.Trust your demon.

— Roger Zelazny

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.

— 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

All of these things considered, it is not surprising that one can detect echoes, correspondences and even an eternal return or two within the work of a single author. The passage of time does bring changes, yea and alas; but still, I would recognize myself anywhere.

— 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.""Oh, that," Tlingel replied.

— Roger Zelazny

Death is the only god that comes when you call.

— Roger Zelazny

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.

— Roger Zelazny

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

— 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

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

The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.

— Roger Zelazny

The power to hurt... has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.

— Roger Zelazny

Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future.

— Roger Zelazny

“Beware,” she recited a personal beatitude, “those who hunger and thirst after justice, for we will be satisfied.”“And beware the meek,” she continued, “for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth.”

— Roger Zelazny

I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking—by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

— 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

Be warned, therefore, that one does not go to hell to light a cigarette.

— Roger Zelazny

“Nothing we did in those days has caused a change.”“Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse,” I told him.

— Roger Zelazny

My mind spun for a second before it drifted, and in that second I knew that of all pleasures—a drink of cold water when you are thirsty, liquor when you are not, sex, a cigarette after many days without one—there is none of them can compare with sleep. Sleep is best....

— Roger Zelazny

This added the element of mystery that made the comparison inevitable: life is a thing that reminds me quite a bit of the beaches around Tokyo Bay. Anything goes. Strange and unique things are being washed up all the time. I’m one of them and so are you. We spend some time on the beach, maybe side by side, and then that slopping, smelling, chilly thing rakes it with the liquid fingers of a crumbling hand and some of the things are gone again.

— Roger Zelazny

Then I could turn around and justify that, by saying that it isn’t really paranoia if there really are people out to get you.

— Roger Zelazny

Symbols, by their very nature, conceal as well as indicate, damn them!

— Roger Zelazny

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

— Roger Zelazny

“Everything that’s miserable in the world,” Nick the dwarf once said to me, “is because of beauty.”“Money is beautiful.”

— Roger Zelazny

Nick swore he’d die with this boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kilimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they’d cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he’d picked up in the hospital. That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I’d been a pallbearer.

— Roger Zelazny

The dead are too much with us.

— Roger Zelazny

Earth grates on my nerves. It gives me a big pain these days. That’s why I live out here. Earth is overcrowded, bureaucratic, unhealthy, and suffering from too many mass-psychoses to bother classifying.

— Roger Zelazny

There comes a time in the history of all bureaucracies when they must inevitably parody their own functions.

— Roger Zelazny

The stars blazed like the love of God, cold and distant.

— Roger Zelazny

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.

— Roger Zelazny

Dwelling beside a body of water is tonic for the weary psyche. Sea smells, sea birds, seawrack, sands—alternately cool, warm, moist and dry—a taste of brine and the presence of the rocking, slopping bluegraygreen spit-flecked waters, has the effect of rinsing the emotions, bathing the outlook, bleaching the conscience.

— Roger Zelazny

“May the blind things at the bottom of the great sea, whose bellies are circles of light,” he said, “recall with pleasure the flavor of your marrow.”

— Roger Zelazny

I’d lived far too long, and with every day that passed the odds kept growing against my lasting much longer. Although they didn’t put it quite that way when giving the sales pitch, my insurance company’s attitude is reflected in the size of the premiums involved.

— Roger Zelazny

“Could Yarl the Omnipotent create a stone so heavy he couldn’t lift it?” Green Green asked him.”Yes, it is. Think about it. Would you?”

— Roger Zelazny

Even if they had been real gods, what did it matter? What was it to me? Here I was still, right where I was born a thousand or so years before, in the middle of the human condition—namely, rubbish and pain. If the gods were real, their only relationship with us was to use us to play their games. Screw them all.

— Roger Zelazny

I had wanted to go after her, to explain my part in what had happened. But I knew it would do no good, so why lose face? When a fairy tale blows up and the dream dust settles and you find yourself standing there, knowing that the last line will never be written, why not omit any exercises in futility?

— Roger Zelazny

“Then it is impossible to get an honest answer from you.”“If by ‘honest answer’ you mean for me to say what you want me to say, whether or not it is true, then I would say that you are correct.”

— Roger Zelazny

He doubted that his petition would be heard, however, since he did not feel that the gods would devote much attention to anything emitted from this particular portion of the world.

— Roger Zelazny

Toward the bright stars, from the dark ground, he hurled another petition, for whatever it was worth.

— Roger Zelazny

There’s no need for your pretty lies now. It makes no difference to an old woman the things a young girl believed.

— Roger Zelazny

So do not speak to me of souls when you have never seen one, man.

— Roger Zelazny

“You were both correct,” said Morningstar. “It is the same thing that you both describe, although neither of you sees it as it really is. Each of you colors reality in keeping with your means of controlling it. For if it is uncontrollable, you fear it. Sometimes then, you color it incomprehensible. In your case, a machine; in theirs, a demon.”

— Roger Zelazny

I have noted, too, that when it comes to matters of security the laws are considerably relaxed.

— Roger Zelazny

“Mercy, I have learned, is a thing that is withheld from one whenever he most needs it,” he said. “Yet when he is in a position to grant it himself, those who withheld it previously cry out for it.”

— Roger Zelazny

Is not love itself a form of a spell, where one is loved and the other loves, and the one who loves is compelled to do the other’s bidding? Of course. It is the same thing.

— Roger Zelazny

On the water, aboard the Proteus, the crowding, the activities, the tempo, of life in the cities, on the land, are muted, slowed—fictionalized—by the metaphysical distancing a few meters of water can provide. We alter the landscape with great facility, but the ocean has always seemed unchanged, and I suppose by extension we are infected with some feelings of timelessness whenever we set out upon her.

— Roger Zelazny

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

— Roger Zelazny

“Cute,” she said, smiling. “If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.”

— Roger Zelazny

Times have changed since the Good Book was written, and you can’t hold with a purely Fundamentalist approach in complex times.

— Roger Zelazny

I had troubles of my own, and even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.

— Roger Zelazny

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

— Roger Zelazny

“And you, I take it, are Red Dorakeen?”“As a matter of fact, yes. You can die.”

— Roger Zelazny

After signing it, he added the postscript: By the time you read this, you will already be dead.

— Roger Zelazny

“...And I have seen stranger things in a long and colorful career.”“You’ve nothing to back it up with. Even if you’re right, I’m still right in not believing without evidence.”

— 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

Never trust a cat, anyway. All they’re good for is stringing tennis racquets.

— Roger Zelazny

It is a city of neat cottages and cobbled streets where wander cats without number, for the enlightened legislators of long ago laid down laws for our protection. A good, kind village, where travelers take their ease and pet the cats, making much of them, which is as it should be.

— Roger Zelazny

“When you talk about being an ‘anticipator,’ of having a pretty good idea of when something’s going to happen—or how, or who will be there—isn’t that a kind of divination?”“No. I think it’s more a kind of subconscious knack for dealing with statistics, against a fairly well-known field of actions.”

— Roger Zelazny

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

— Roger Zelazny

It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.

— Roger Zelazny

Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.

— Roger Zelazny