129 quotes
We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?
Babel-17 (1966)
‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’
Neveryóna (1983)
The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.
Triton (1976)
Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.
Nova (1968)
You understand, Pryn, I don’t believe in any of it: magic, miracles, religion, the calling of the gods, named or unnamed.
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
Could it be, he wondered, he’d only thought he’d seen what he’d seen because of his own desires, researches, expectations?
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
Dull grown-ups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship.
Nova (1968)
I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
Appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists.
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.
Nova (1968)
Sincerity is my favorite form of belligerence.
Lines of Power (1968)
To be a bandit is better than to be a slave!
Neveryóna (1983)
You mean I’ve come all this way to kill a man, and you tell me he’s gone?
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
I'm not a big fan of censorship, to put it mildly.
Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat.
Neveryóna (1983)
Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone else does.
They Fly at Çiron (1993)
One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words.
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)