Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Zelazny - Page 2

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

Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.

The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls.

When your bow is broken and your last arrow spent, then shoot, shoot with your whole heart.

Sleep is perhaps the only among life's great pleasures which need not be of short duration.

I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.

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.

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.

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

Strygalldwir is my name. Conjure with it and I will eat your heart and liver." "Conjure with it? I can't even pronounce it, and my cirrhosis would give you indigestion.

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

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.

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.

There are none of you, good doctors, could cope with my family anyway.

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

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.

It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.

Love is a negative form of hatred.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?" "Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.

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.

Good-bye and hello, as always.

'Fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming.

I guess you have to be a little arrogant to be a writer. I decided early on that just because a lot of other writers were bothered by getting bad reviews didn't really mean that the things were particularly important. By the same token, the good ones didn't mean all that much either. So I just forget about reviews and I wrote what I wanted.

I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not--so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.

There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes.

Go and copulate with yon purple lizard.

I worked out a book which I thought was just straight science fiction -- with everything pretty much explained, and suddenly I got an idea which I thought was kind of neat for working in a mythological angle. I'm really struggling with myself. It would probably be a better book if I include it, but on the other hand I don't always like to keep reverting to it. I think what I'm going to do is vary my output, do some straight science fiction and some straight fantasy that doesn't involve mythology, and composites.

If I get enough letters saying you never explained this or that, I suppose I'll have to write another book.

Of course it does not apply to me. I am the soul of honor, kindness, mercy and goodness. Trust me in all things.

The dead are too much with us.

Death is mighty, and is no one's friend.

Do you work for the government, any government?” "I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.

Any man would be forsworn to gain a kingdom.

I walked among Shadows, and found a race of furry creatures, dark and clawed and fanged, reasonably manlike, and about as intelligent as a freshman in the high school of your choice-sorry, kids, but what I mean is they were loyal, devoted, honest, and too easily screwed by bastards like me and my brother. I felt like the dee-jay of your choice.

A bizarrerie of fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest nature swirl of black ashes assembled in prancing cadence to the lowing note of desert wind down the arroyo behind buildings as empty yet filled as the pages of unread books or stillnesses between the notes of a song.

The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.

After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

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.

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.

Time passed slowly, like and old man climbing a hill.

Beware the meek ... for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth.

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.

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.

You who are dead ... tonight you will disport yourselves for my pleasure. Food and wine will pass between your dead lips, though you will not taste it. Your dead stomachs will hold it within you, while your dead feet take the measure of a dance. Your dead mouths will speak words that will have no meaning to you, and you will embrace one another without pleasure. You will sing for me if I wish it. You will lie down again when I will it.... Let the revelry begin.

The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.

Death is the only limit to the road you travel.

Tonight I will suck the marrow from your bones!” it said. “I will dry them and work them most cunningly into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!” “You burn prettily,” I said.

I would never rest until I held vengeance and the throne within my hand, and good night sweet prince to anybody who stood between me and these things.

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha.

I tried a very fancy attack I'd learned in France, which involved a beat, a feint in quarte, a feint in sixte, and a lunge veering off into an attack on his wrist. I nicked him, and the blood flowed.

Thus did I bear Sir Lancelot de Lac to the Keep of Ganleon, whom I trusted like a brother. That is to say, not at all.

A powerful flight of the imagination . . . an entirely enjoyable reading experience, wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence.

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

The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.

Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it. Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?' A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.' You enjoy this duty?' He nodded. I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.

I'm a lost soul. We do wail.

You are a fool to speak of last great battles...for the last great battle is always the next one.