Quotes from Roger Zelazny

I was writing 'He Who Shapes' when I was working for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore.

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

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

I have often thought of doing a story with someone either as a human being or as a robot who, by a series of stages, changes into the other end of the spectrum. By the story's end, he'd be either totally robotic or totally human, the opposite of what he once was. And possibly... bring him back again.

When I got to college, I didn't take writing classes, just the standard freshman composition class.

I always wanted to write, ever since I was a kid. I started writing at the age of 11. All I wanted to do was finish my education and have my nights free for writing.

Space opera was the sort of story on which I grew up. When I was younger, I read heavily in pulp magazines. They were readily available in the stores.

The first time I met Harlan Ellison, we were both unpublished young punks in Cleveland, Ohio.

I am fascinated, I suppose, by a flawed man with a streak of greatness.

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I started taking psychology courses. I was interested in the nature of the human mind, the structure itself, pathologies with which it is afflicted. I really intended to be a writer all along, but I needed to take a subject that I could make a living at, either teaching it or doing it.

I tried a very fancy attack I'd learned in France, which involved a beat, a feint in quarte, a feint in sixte, and a lunge veering off into an attack on his wrist. I nicked him, and the blood flowed.

If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.

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

I do admire great essayists. I'm a particular fan of good nature writing. People like Robert Finch. I read great quantities of writing by naturalists. I've been studying the genre for years.

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.

A powerful flight of the imagination . . . an entirely enjoyable reading experience, wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence.

Death is mighty, and is no one's friend.