Quotes

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' -- people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.

Though I don't have any serious argument with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', I believe that Americans cease to be Europeans -- the land makes them become Americans. You see it happening all the time when you travel around America.

That John Boorman movie Hope and Glory (1987) is actually very similar to my own life. You grow up in ruins. You grow up in a very malleable landscape that was constantly changing. Something would be gone, but at the same time that opened up vistas of new landscape, so you were constantly getting these very peculiar changes of environment. The Chaos stuff in 'Stormbringer' is very much the way it felt, but it didn't feel weird because it's all you knew.

About The Final Programme (1973): It was finally agreed that Robert Fuest would use my script, and Fuest didn't like this, but he said, "Super! Marvellous! We're all very excited here, Michael." And off he went. And when I went down to watch when he started shooting, it began to dawn on me that he was using his original script - he'd actually chucked mine and was using his own script. The result was that he ended up with about three hours of film, two hours of which were primarily reaction shots - all the stuff I'd crossed out with a pen was back in there.

The Multiverse isn't a globe. Time isn't cyclic. There is no real linearity. The Multiverse is a tree root and branch, a living organism. A creature. Like me. Forever adapting and changing. Like us, made up of spheres, but it's not itself spherical. We've evolved beyond the merely spheroid, I hope.

About his character Dorian Hawkmoon: In a spirit consciously at odds with the jingoism of the day, I chose a German for a hero and the British for villains.

Death was the future of all people, all planets, all universes. Their struggle was symbolic of the futility of living creatures who fought against their own inevitable extinction. What were a few more years of existence compared to the longevity of a cosmos?

When confused, men turn to war and women to magic.

What the local politicians actually meant was that they hoped to claim the land in the name of the public and then make the usual profits privatizing it. There was a principle at stake. They had to ensure their friends and not outsiders got the benefit.

It's a vicious circle in politics. You can't get to be president unless you have the wealth and you can't really make massive sums until you're president.

Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They've become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can't survive without it. (1997)

The human race has for too long been manufacturing convenient fantasies and calling them laws. For ages this was so. Take war, for instance. Politicians assume that something is true, assume that strife is inevitable, and by building on such false assumptions, lo and behold, they create further wars which they have, ostensibly, sought to prevent.

We have, until now, accepted too many fantasies as being truths, too many truths as fantasies. And we have one last chance to discover the real nature of our existence. I am prepared to take it!

The best joke is but a simple statement of truth. But it is a pity that men do not laugh at it more often.

Time and Matter are both ideas. Matter makes a more immediate impression on Man, but Time's effects are longer lasting.

Responsibility, my dear, is another word for self-interest. For survival.

I have never had trouble with conflicting interpretations of my work. Once the story is published, it belongs to the reader. (1967)

An ethic is simply a system of survival. What does an ethic mean when there is no chance of survival?

Everything dies eventually—but that shouldn't stop us enjoying life while it is there to be enjoyed.

Time, the changer, could not be changed. Space, perhaps, the material environment, could be conquered. Time, never.

Men are greedy and will not see the truth for the gleam of coin.

Every court must have its fool, every great ideal must attract some who are motivated only by self-interest.

Childhood is the happiest time of life except when you're a child.

It is often safer to dwell in the lion's lair than outside it. Safer still to live in a land where there are no lions.

Justice can be manufactured in small quantities. But we have to work hard, fight well and use great wisdom to produce just a tiny amount.

All is chaos, there is no meaning to existence, there is only one advantage to living one's life and that is to discover all the sensations the human mind and body is capable of feeling.

We can only be kind to one another. There is scarcely any alternative if we are to resist chaos.

He only wanted what every man wanted—freedom from fear, a chance to raise children with a reasonable certainty that they would be allowed to do the same, a chance to look forward to the future without the knowledge that any plans made might be wrecked forever by some sudden act of violence.

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?

Time to be moving; moves to be timing.

To the fearful all things are chaotic. That's how you get religion (and its bastard child, politics).

There must be countless forms of love. Which is the form which conquers the rest? I cannot define it. I shall not try.

Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.

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

I would be grateful if I was allowed to work out my own destiny for once. For good or ill.

How many disasters had that moon witnessed? How many foolish crusades? How many wars and battles and murders?

Women are always underestimated by men, and this enables them sometimes to gather far more power to themselves than the men suspect.

How true it is when they say there is nothing which makes a man more furious than the discovery that he has deceived himself!

There is a monotonous pattern to the rise of tyrants which, I suppose, is reflected in the general pattern of human folly. Depressing though it is, we must accept the fact.

Knowledge ceases to be wisdom when one has no method for making sense or use of what one learns.

Evil flourishes best in disguise. And the best disguise is simple: Honest patriotism, joyful idealism. Show me a man who cries "my country right or wrong", and I'll show you one who'd cheerfully murder half his own nation in the name of patriotism.

Only children believe they can achieve enormous power over the world without paying a price for that power. And the price so often is the sanity of the one who seeks it.

To be a hero, forever at war, is to be in some ways always a child. The true challenge comes in making sense of one's life, of imbuing it with purpose based on one's own principles.

Chaos has her moods and whims, that's all. she cannot remain stable. It is in her nature to be forever changing. While it is in the nature of Law to be forever fixed. The Balance is there to ensure that neither Law nor Chaos ever gain complete ascendancy, for the one offers sterility while the other offers only sensation.

There is nothing more puerile than the mind of a tyrant.

This is an Age of Gods, I am afraid. There are many, big and small, and they crowd the universe. Once it was not so. Sometimes, I suspect, the universe manages with none at all!

There are times when sides must be taken lest all that one loves is destroyed. I have never known another answer to the problem, though the taking of an extreme position will always make a man lose something of his humanity

It is your capacity for love that makes you strong. Your capacity for hate directs your strength.

Everything may exist for a short while—even justice. But the true state of the universe is anarchy. It is the mortal's tragedy that he can never accept this.

It has often been noted that gods could not exist without mortals and mortals could not exist without gods. Yet gods, it appears, can affect our destinies. And we can affect theirs, can we not?