Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Zelazny

I enjoy slaughtering beasts, and I think of my relatives constantly.

When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all.

Ultimately, you've got to have something to say, so a writer should continue learning things throughout life. But I don't think education makes one a writer.

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I started taking psychology courses. I was interested in the nature of the human mind, the structure itself, pathologies with which it is afflicted. I really intended to be a writer all along, but I needed to take a subject that I could make a living at, either teaching it or doing it.

I am fascinated, I suppose, by a flawed man with a streak of greatness.

It's hard not to be a part of your time.

Space opera was the sort of story on which I grew up. When I was younger, I read heavily in pulp magazines. They were readily available in the stores.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

I have a fondness for technology. It's great to spend hours puttering around with mechanical things gotten from junkyards and visualizing what their use might be. Especially if you come across a gadget or tool and you don't know what it is and you try to figure it out. I'm fascinated by processes, whatever they might be.

I got the idea for my novel 'Lord of Light' when I cut myself shaving just before I was to go on a panel at a convention. I had to go out there with this big gash in my face. I remember that I thought, 'I wish I could change bodies.'

I always wanted to write, ever since I was a kid. I started writing at the age of 11. All I wanted to do was finish my education and have my nights free for writing.

I find fantasy easier to write. If I'm going to write science fiction, I spend a lot more time thinking up justifications. I can write fantasy without thinking as much. I like to balance things out: a certain amount of fantasy and a certain amount of science fiction.

I enjoy travel very much. I've taken the kids to Europe when there were just the two boys.

In any novel I write, I have in my mind several things which happened in the protagonist's past which I never mention in the book.

I do admire great essayists. I'm a particular fan of good nature writing. People like Robert Finch. I read great quantities of writing by naturalists. I've been studying the genre for years.

Columbia University in 1959 had a kind of reputation that interested me.

I care more, and I think readers do also, for characters in a state of transformation.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.

I was writing 'He Who Shapes' when I was working for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore.

I read Herman Hesse's 'Siddhartha' while I was writing 'Lord of Light' along with many other things. It seemed a good time to read it so I could see what he had to say about Buddha. In my first chapter, I was thinking in terms of the big battle scene in the 'Mahabarata.' It helped me in visualizing the battle in my novel.

The places where I have the nameless character in 'My Name Is Legion' meet his boss are real places I've been to. That works well for tax purposes, writing into my stories the places I've actually visited.

So long as no one knows everything about you, you have resources you can call upon for which no one is really prepared.

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

The first time I met Harlan Ellison, we were both unpublished young punks in Cleveland, Ohio.

When I got to college, I didn't take writing classes, just the standard freshman composition class.

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

I have often thought of doing a story with someone either as a human being or as a robot who, by a series of stages, changes into the other end of the spectrum. By the story's end, he'd be either totally robotic or totally human, the opposite of what he once was. And possibly... bring him back again.

Robots are very tricky to design and expensive, whereas humans are cheaply manufactured. Humans can handle things with greater manual dexterity than most robots I've known.

When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.

There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.

One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.

I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something--or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.

Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.

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

If you ever loved anything in your life, try to remember it. If you ever betrayed anything, pretend for a moment that you have been forgiven. If you ever feared anything, pretend for an instant that those days are gone and will never return. Buy the lie and hold to it for as long as you can. Press your familiar, whatever its name, to your breast and stroke it till it purrs.

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

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.

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.

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.

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

That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.

It would be nice if there were some one thing constant and unchanging in the universe. If there is such a thing, then it is a thing which would have to be stronger than love, and it is a thing which I do not know.

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.

If a building is falling on you, you don't concern yourself with the horn of an approaching car. You deal with the most immediate peril first. That's survival.

In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils; and on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on the day the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I too will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Until then, I will not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.

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

I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

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.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

Nobody steals books but your friends.

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.

Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today.

Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

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

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.