Quotes from Michael Moorcock

Memory is the foundation of identity. Through our sense of identity, we act. We determine our moral judgements. We rewrite our own memories, of course, all the time. We create fresh narratives to use in our survival. We agree on fresh histories enabling us to take action. It is part of what makes us such flawed creatures. Creatures of such narrative fiction creating cause and effect.

I can accept then, that we are more than forsaken, because there was never anything there to forsake us.

That the world forgets me is all I ask," Elric sighed.

We are wary of you, Elric. Even if we allowed you to lead us again you would take your own doomed path and us with you. There is no future here for myself and my men.

Yet the place was strangely old-fashioned. The strongest feeling I got from New York at first was nostalgia. A 1930s vision of the future.

Elric offered Moonglum a smile that had gratitude in it. "You are—a good friend—I wonder why . . .

No!" His scream was anguished, unbelieving. "No!" Tears flowed down his contorted face as he ran his hands through the fine dust. With a groan which racked his whole being, he fell forward, his face hitting the disintegrated parchment. Time had destroyed the Book—untouched, possibly forgotten, for three hundred centuries. Even the wise and powerful gods who had created it had perished—and now its knowledge followed them into oblivion.

The merchants were already regretting their haste in contacting the albino. They had a feeling that not only were the legends true—but they did not do justice to the strange-eyed man they wished to employ.

His life was over. The conflicts which tore his mind would no longer trouble him. His fears, his torments, his loves and his hatreds all lay in the past and only oblivion lay before him. .... Even when blackness overwhelmed him and his lungs filled with water, the words continued to whisper through the corridors of his brain. It was strange that he should be dead and still hear the incantation.

Our Di had, according to her myth, been hounded to death by the baying werewolves of the yellow press. Of course it was now plain I was one. Maybe even the worst of them. Some people claimed they had actually seen me baying. In the tunnel. With the blood of their angel on my hands.

They offer you so much power. All that patriarchy! So tempting to take advantage of it.

he cursed the malevolent Gods for the black day when idly, for their amusement, they had spawned men.

I have hated hypocrisy and deception all my life, yet all my life I have been victim to it. That is the terrible irony.

That night they slept restlessly and, as he had predicted, Elric screamed agonizingly in his turbulent, terror-filled sleep and he called a name which made Shaarilla's eyes fill with pain and jealousy. Wide-eyed in his grim sleep, Elric seemed to be staring at the one he named, speaking other words in a sibilant language which made Shaarilla block her ears and shudder.

I think the notion of worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication.

I am a man possessed," he groaned, "and without this devil-blade I carry I would not be a man at all.

I have sometimes wondered what social stability is. It is probably just a question of points of view and personal experience.

No one lives in Ameeron by choice.' 'A veritable City of the Damned.' 'As the poet might remark, aye.' Rackhir offered Elric a sardonic wink. 'But I sometimes think all cities are that.'

Power is neither good nor evil. It is the use one makes of it which is good or evil.

This gentleman is known the width and breadth of the comics world as that bastard Klaw.

ELRIC, LORD OF the lost and sundered Empire of Melniboné, rode like a fanged wolf from a trap—all slavering madness and mirth. He rode from Nadsokor, City of Beggars, and there was hate in his wake for he had been recognized as their old enemy before he could obtain the secret he had sought there. Now they hounded him and the grotesque little man who rode laughing at Elric's side; Moonglum the Outlander, from Elwher and the Unmapped East.

People are not alarmed by the unusual so long as it is placed in an acceptable context.

Moonglum sighed. "Elric—this once, let us not court the danger.

I cannot justify my actions. Roldero had said that men must be judged by their deeds, not their motives. I offer such speculation only n the hope that by understanding our motives we may thus control our deeds.