Quotes from K.J. Parker

Here lies Mago the boxer, of whom it may honestly be said that he never harmed anybody.

Always tell as much truth as you can when you're lying," he said. "Nothing deceives like the truth.

It'd have been so nice if my life had been a well-controlled experiment. You know; start off with your basic ingredients, add education, experiences, events, stirring with a glass rod, when appropriate retarding the reaction with a block of ice. Predictable consequences, intended results, and something worth having at the end. Hasn't quite worked out like that. As for the result, the product, we'll have to wait and see. I may yet surprise myself.

The world is full of idiots, and always has been. But sometimes I wonder why such a disproportionate quantity of them end up running other people's lives.)

I really don't understand why people go on about how wonderful the truth is. In my experience, all it does is make trouble.

And belief, like love and sleep, is something you can't do anything about. You can't make it come if you want it, and you can't make it go if you don't.

Witnesses are, of course, ambivalent; some of them need record what would otherwise be lost and go to waste, while others need to hunted down and killed before they cant tell what they know; and the man who stands on the grave of the last witness own the truth and is responsible for it, a dangerous trustee.

Ah, the people. My countrymen, my fellow citizens, my brothers. Mind you, some of them are all right, when you get to know them. But a lot of them aren't; and here's a funny thing, because when you mix them together, the ones that are all right and the ones that aren't, as often as not the resulting blend is far worse than the sum of its parts. Greedier, more cowardly, more stupid.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? "That's like saying the cat's cat is a dog.

An old man I met in the slave camp told me once, always be positive. He died of gangrene, something it's hard to be positive about, and he spent his last week on earth whimpering, but I've always tried to follow his advice, even so.

It's how I do things. First, despair. Then hope.

Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.

The people turn out to be—well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons.

He could feel himself sliding into sleep, there was a dream already open and waiting for him to fall into it.

The thing about me that seems to puzzle people the most - people who know me, who believe what i tell them - is that I can write the most profound things without actually meaning them. I can persuade people of things I don't believe myself,or (more usually) simply don't care about

If a man exists who is immune to force, even if he's the most blameless anchorite living on top of a column in the middle of the desert, he is beyond government, beyond authority, and cannot be controlled; and that would be intolerable.

Being dead is bad enough. Being dead and still having to walk around and eat is so much worse.

A voice in my head said, can't be helped. Why do I listen to those voices? Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it's just you and you know you're basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?

I tend to keep my thoughts to myself, which is why I scowl a lot,

I told you that you wouldn't like me. I understand. It shows proper feeling. If you said to me: There's this man who is so callous and brutal that he doesn't give a damn about his fellow human beings, wouldn't shed a tear over the death of an innocent; would you care to meet this person, shake hands with him, maybe invite him into your home and have dinner with him? You're kidding, right. That hypothetical piece of shit is, of course, me.

When you come to rely on the written word, it's time to light the fire with it.

I'm starting to get the enemy and the auditors muddled up in my mind. I'm terrified of both of them, but the auditors know where I live.

Moral: don't play with savage things that are stronger than you are.

I have my faults. But when I hear bad news that's palpably true, I don't argue or ask for proof.