Quotes from Steven Brust

I'd rather be running the game than playing it.

Just because they really are out to get you doesn't mean you aren't paranoid.

There are millions of ways for people to die, if you number each vital organ, each ways it can fail, all the poisons from the earth and the sea which can cause these failures.

It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.

Do you think it's possible to discuss politics without preaching?

No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will cramp his style.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

Every once in while, a person will do something obvious and direct that is no more than it appears to be. I think they do it to throw you off.

But once you allow yourself to recognize necessity, you find two things: One you find your options so restricted that the only course of action is obvious, and, two, that a great sense of freedom comes with the decision.

What's the point of having weak enemies? They just waste your time.

I guess there's just a time for doing dumb things.

The struggle is always worthwhile, if the end be worthwhile and the means honorable; foreknowledge of defeat is not sufficient reason to withdraw from the contest.

To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity.

It is always man's ideas which drive his actions. This has, at times, resulted in great evil; but as we look around us, we cannot doubt that it has resulted in greater good.

She smiled at me. We were all friends here. Morrolan carried Blackwand, which slew a thousand at the Wall of Barrit's Tomb. Aliera carried Pathfinder, which they say served a power higher than the Empire. Sethra carried Iceflame, which embodied within it the power of the Dzur Mountain. I carried myself rather well, thank you.

He got up and walked out, so I missed seeing the powerful sorcerer doing his powerful sorcery, which would have involved him closing his eyes and then, I don't know, maybe taking a deep breath or something.

What are you working on?" "I'm trying to set up a store to sell baskets of none-of-your-fucking-business at wholesale prices.

Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun in to and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.

What's the point of having weak enemies? They just waste your time.

Your job is to find better ideas, mine is to cut holes in the ones you have, and you've already done that pretty well.

Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Plot, Behaving in Much the Manner Of a Soup to which Corn Starch Has been Added, Begins, at Last, to Thicken.

Pittsburgh. I'd been there. One of the most underrated cities in North America. People who'd never been there thought of it as a graveyard of abandoned steel mills, but it was a beautiful city, and it would be good to have it back.

Grand," I said. "Just grand. I get myself into the army, stand up in battles I have no business in, get nailed in the back by sorcery, accept an impossible assignment to be carried out in the middle of it all, and then, just to top things off, I have to go have a mystical fucking experience. This is just great.

Paarfi undertakes a detailed examination on the virtues of brevity: It would seem, therefore, that if we allow our readers, by virtue of being in the company of the historian, to eavesdrop on this interchange, we will have, in one scene, discharged two obligations; a sacrifice, if we may say so, to the god Brevity, whom all historians, indeed, all who work with the written word, ought to worship. We cannot say too little on this subject.