Roger Zelazny

“I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend.”

“I got the idea for my novel 'Lord of Light' when I cut myself shaving just before I was to go on a panel at a convention. I had to go out there with this big gash in my face. I remember that I thought, 'I wish I could change bodies.'”

“Robots are very tricky to design and expensive, whereas humans are cheaply manufactured. Humans can handle things with greater manual dexterity than most robots I've known.”

“In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.”

“Columbia University in 1959 had a kind of reputation that interested me.”

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

“In any novel I write, I have in my mind several things which happened in the protagonist's past which I never mention in the book.”

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

“Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.”

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

“Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck.”

“I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.”

“I have often thought of doing a story with someone either as a human being or as a robot who, by a series of stages, changes into the other end of the spectrum. By the story's end, he'd be either totally robotic or totally human, the opposite of what he once was. And possibly... bring him back again.”

“It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.”

“I enjoy travel very much. I've taken the kids to Europe when there were just the two boys.”

“Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.' Sam held out his hand. "Give me some tobacco and a paper.”

“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.”

“I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.”

“Wheels turning, the motorcycle’s roar grows steady, which, too, is a form of silence.”

“The places where I have the nameless character in 'My Name Is Legion' meet his boss are real places I've been to. That works well for tax purposes, writing into my stories the places I've actually visited.”