Quotes from Roger Zelazny

Any man would be forsworn to gain a kingdom.

Some natural skepticism as to the purity of all human motives came and sat upon my chest...

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

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.

Nobody steals books but your friends.

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

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

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

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

Good-bye and hello, as always.

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.

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.

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

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.

When I said I wanted to die in my sleep, I meant I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

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

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

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

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.

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.

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

the headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse.

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.