Michael Moorcock Quotes

I know not which I prefer the look of - those who attack us or that which defends us!

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

On such ventures as these one is
inclined to forget much, as one forgets a dream.

I have a kind of innate sense of structure, which also makes me a good mimic.

The legends which offer a race their sense of pride and history eventually become putrid.

By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.

I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.

There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.

Who told you that the world was just?' Elric

It's getting late. I must return to my ship or my men will think I've drowned and be celebrating.

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

I am a thousand time more evil than thou!

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful

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

Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!

We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.

If the people at the top think that reaching for a gun will solve the problem, why shouldn't the people at the bottom think the same?

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

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

Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.

Relaxed, I lit a spliff.

I really did have a very egalitarian upbringing.

P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.

The problems for which I could find no solution in fact had no solution.

All Empires fall, All ages die, All strife shall be in vain. All Kings go down, All hope must fail, But Tanelorn remains Our Tanelorn remains ...

Man was not born to a world of justice. But he can create such a world!

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

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.

I walk the moonbeam roads a silver web connecting the many worlds of the Multiverse.

a society dedicated solely to the preservation of her past, soon has only her past to sell.

Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.

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

Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.

Religion was the creation of fear. Knowledge destroys fear. Without fear, religion can't survive.

We would all be better off dead, useless eaters of the lotus that we are.

We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

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

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

Time is the enemy of identity

The Lords of Chaos are
the enemies of Logic,
the jugglers of Truth,
the molders of Beauty

Ah, the world was ever so. How sad are heroes when their tasks are done ...

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

I come from an almost wholly secular background and have no quarrel with religion.

Death is the promise we're all born with, sir. A good
death is better than a poor one.

The past is a script we are constantly rewriting.

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!

women of exotic appearance.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

Treasures are not won by care and forethought
but by swift slaying and reckless attack.

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

It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.

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

He knew that for all his admission of Chaos he would be better able to do what he wished in a world ordered by some degree of Law. The

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.

Is the prisoner a prisoner because he lives in a cage or because he knows that he lives in a cage?

But people may do great good accidentally, though with evil intentions - conversely people may do great evil though having the best of intentions.

The subtlest lie of all is the full truth.