Quotes from Fred Saberhagen

Farslayer howls across the world For thy heart! For thy heart! who hast wronged me, Vengeance is his who casts the Blade, Yet he will, in the end, no triumph see.

In stories, any number of imbeciles may be encountered, ready to deliberately insult strangers who are aiming deadly weapons at them. In real life, there are only a few folk so suicidally inclined.

But even the best luck is no good until it's used, and we must find the right way to use it.

Really, it was my fickleness, I sometimes think, that they found unendurable. If I had restricted myself to only one of their sweet girls, and married her, and chewed her neck in private, I suppose I might, like any eccentric cousin, have been made almost welcome among family and friends in the circle of the hearth. But perhaps I misjudge what degree of eccentricity even an Englishman can tolerate.

it is my belief that most of any vampire's really essential nourishment comes from some mysteriously penetrating emanation of the Sun.

Very few other people were about. At last, leaning against the outer wall of the Westenra tomb, I managed to pick up a faint radiance of Lucy's encomaed mind within.

The pendulum he really faced was that of choice. His mind could swing one way, tick, and meet in foresight the shame of swallowed truth and swallowed pride, all the humiliation of an enforced recanting. And if he swung his thoughts the other way, tock, there they confronted the breaking agony of the boot or the rack or the slower destruction in a buried cell.

The universe is bad; and men are fools, never really all on the same side in any war.

It had been fifteen years since Belam's warning injunction, which Vincento himself had since managed almost to forget. Other scholars before and since had talked of the heliocentric hypothesis with impunity and had used it in their published calculations. But when the Defenders' summons came, Vincento realized that he had bitterly antagonized men who were in high places and who never forgot anything.

The metal war-machines that humans called berserkers were the ultimate enemy of everything that lived. The creators of those inanimate weapons were gone, but the weapons themselves raged on across the Galaxy, endlessly repairing and replicating themselves, improving their own design, and refining their killing capabilities in an eternal effort to accomplish their basic programmed task, the elimination of all life, wherever and whenever they could find it.

ysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.

For at every stage of your civilizations there are numbers of you who put aside selfishness and dedicate their lives in service to something they see as being greater than themselves. I say you may prevail, I say not that you will. For in each of your generations there are men who choose to serve the gods of darkness.

It must be nice to declare yourself an emperor or whatever, and have people hurl themselves all over the galaxy to do everything for you." "Can't be nice to have someone bring you your brother's corpse

Technology! How can any man who means to keep his sanity go far in such an art?

Life, with all its snares and entanglements. The rewards that never lasted, that always disappointed in the end. And all the longings ending in defeat whether they were denied or satisfied.

When in extremis it is not the intellect I trust, but something deeper and more elemental, whether it be called blind Fortune, or a warrior's instincts.

Every instinct warned me that from this hour my strength must wane, till dawn came like a fire to burn away my life—unless before dawn I had found rest.

I doubt I'll ever do another book collaboration; I've been spoiled. Roger and I both happened to move to New Mexico at about the same time, when we each had a family of young kids to raise. Socializing seemed to lead naturally to working together.

I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn't. I have drawers full of - or I did have - drawers full of rejection slips.

Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.

More immediately, I'm currently working on another Dracula in which there will be connections with ancient Egypt. That's about as far as I want to go in commenting on current work.

The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental.

The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who've happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It's happened a few times in forty years.

There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.