Explore Quotes by Roger Zelazny

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

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

I find fantasy easier to write. If I'm going to write science fiction, I spend a lot more time thinking up justifications. I can write fantasy without thinking as much. I like to balance things out: a certain amount of fantasy and a certain amount of science fiction.

Ultimately, you've got to have something to say, so a writer should continue learning things throughout life. But I don't think education makes one a writer.

When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?" "Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

Time passed slowly, like and old man climbing a hill.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

I enjoy slaughtering beasts, and I think of my relatives constantly.

It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.

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

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.

One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.

I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.

The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.