Quotes from Michael Moorcock

Therefore it seemed a dreadful injustice that these wise races should perish at the hands of creatures who were still little more than animals. It was as if vultures feasted on and squabbled over the paralyzed body of the youthful poet who could only stare at them with puzzled eyes as they slowly robbed him of an exquisite existence they would never appreciate, never know they were taking.

And you, Prince Elric? She attracted the albino's wandering attention. Do you know his story? Elric shook his head. I only know, he said, that he is a shape-changer and, that most cursed of souls, a person of rare goodness and sanity. Imagine such torment as is his!

To seek pain as a form of salvation is to destroy oneself.

The mask of kindly patronage had dropped away to show the hatred and the fear beneath.

In an infinite universe, all may become real sooner or later. Yet it is always up to mankind to make real what it really wishes to be real.

There was certainly much to be said for being at the mercy of the primeval elements, to be swept along by circumstances one could not in any way control, but it was good to return, to feel one's identity expand again, unchecked.

Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.

Man can live by bread alone when all his energies are devoted to attaining that bread, but once his mind is clear, once he has ceased to labour through all his waking hours to find food, then he begins to think.

Then the earth grew old, its landscapes mellowing and showing signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner of a man in his last years...

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

There is less danger, gentlemen, in living according to a set of high moral principles than most politicians believe.

In many ways the recent history of the Ukraine can be seen as an intensified version of the history of our era. Most of the political issues are familiar to us. Most of the methods used to meet those issues are also familiar. Events in the Ukraine prefigured events through the rest of the world...

It was a world ruled these days by the gun, the guitar, and the needle, sexier than sex, where the good right hand had become the male's primary sexual organ...

It happens to many like that," he said. "I have seen them. But you have to show them so much injustice first... Nobody wants to believe that the world is cruel—or that one's own kind are cruel. Not to know cruelty is to remain innocent, eh? And we should all like to remain innocent. A revolutionist is a man who, perhaps, fails to keep his innocence but so desperately wants it back that he seeks to create a world where all shall be innocent in that way.

I have brought evil to many places," he said, "but usually there has already been evil to match mine. I seek no excuses, for I know what I am and I know what I have done. I have slain malignant sorcerers and destroyed oppressors, but I have also been responsible for slaying fine men, and a woman, my cousin, whom I loved, I killed—or my sword did.

IT IS THE colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby.

If we are the toys of the gods are not perhaps the gods themselves mere children?

She had enjoyed a phase where she found it easier to divide herself and argue, as it were, face to face, than to attempt to arrange her thoughts in the conventional manner.

For the mind of man alone is free to explore the lofty vastness of the cosmic infinite, to transcend ordinary consciousness, to roam the secret corridors of the brain where past and future melt into one... And universe and individual are linked, the one mirrored in the other, and each contains the other.

One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired The Lord of the Rings.

Life's not easy, it is a hard task to live it well and with grace—but, by Hades, let's not complicate it with deities and water-nymphs!

Know this. Elric cannot have want he desires most. What he desires does not exist. What he desires is dead. All Elric has is sorrow, guilt, malice, hatred. This is all he deserves and all he will ever desire.

The note took long moments to fade and, when it had at last died away, there was an absolute hush over the world, the milling millions were still, there was an air of expectancy. And then the White Lords came.

At which Charion Pratt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices made by lovers.