Roger Zelazny Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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