Quotes from Fritz Leiber

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.

The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.

The Mouser sighed. The moment had come, he knew, as it always did, when outward circumstances and inner urges commanded an act, when curiosity and fascination tipped the scale of caution, when the lure of a vision and an adventure became so great and deep-hooking that he must respond to it or have his inmost self-respect eaten away.

There we were, a small bunch of rather bright and fortunate young people, thinking ourselves somehow special and exceptional, but really very naive.

I'll never stop writing. It's one occupation in which being crazy, even senile, might help.

I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?

Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them.

He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.

Girls are for dessert.

A good earthy witch is more honest than some city rogue tricked out in black cone-hat and robe of stars

Certainly we've made important innovations, chief among them the systematic use of the scientific method," he said at one point, "but the primitive groundwork is still there, dominating the pattern of our lives. We're modified anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships. What else could you expect us to be?

It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost")

After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind.

Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance — which their power protected.

We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness.

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

Maud chuckled proudly and Erich shouted, "Welcome back from the Void, Kamerad," and then, because he's German and thinks all parties have to be noisy and satirically pompous, he jumped on a couch and announced, "Heren und Damen, permit me to introduce the noblest Roman of them all, Marcus Vipsalus Niger".

If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat.

Of course it had been an hallucination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities, with a score of coincidences to back them up, even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and yours in a direct physical way— No, more than that. When you must keep faith with someone you love.

At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites - milky ovals infinitely eerie in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips.

if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.