Piers Anthony Quotes

Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.

One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not. We who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs, or seem to seek them. Who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors. We are not that way from perversity, and we cannot just relax and let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to.

When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

One day you'll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless.

When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.

But one must go where one's road leads, even when it's a distressing road.

For our stories are not yet finished, and perhaps will never be.

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

That most dangerous of opponents: the one who took pains to comprehend the position of his adversary.

Every person professes to love good and hate evil, but in his actions his real preferences emerges.

Never thought I'd see the day when Death was denied. That leaves taxes as the only certainty.

Information is power. --Humfrey

The biggest fool is the one who thinks he knows it all.

Obviously it could be, because it was.

Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.

I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.

The library is a place of mental diversion, learning, and comfort for anyone who has an intellect. I know of no librarian who when asked for food for the mind will offer a stone. What more could anyone ask?

SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

One reason I don't suffer Writer's Block is that I don't wait on the muse, I summon it at need.

I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth.

Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

Dor woke again as dawn came. The sun had somehow gotten around to the east, where the land was, and dried off so that it could shine again.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.