Michael Moorcock Quotes

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

For the mind of man alone is free to explore the lofty vastness of the cosmic infinite, to transcend ordinary consciousness, to roam the secret corridors of the brain where past and future melt into one ... And universe and individual are linked, the one mirrored in the other, and each contains the other.

The past is a script we are constantly rewriting.

I have brought evil to many places," he said, "but usually there has already been evil to match mine. I seek no excuses, for I know what I am and I know what I have done. I have slain malignant sorcerers and destroyed oppressors, but I have also been responsible for slaying fine men, and a woman, my cousin, whom I loved, I killed - or my sword did.

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

And you, Prince Elric?" She attracted the albino's wandering attention. "Do you know his story?"
Elric shook his head.
"I only know," he said, "that he is a shape-changer and, that most cursed of souls, a person of rare goodness and sanity. Imagine such torment as is his!

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

We must be bound to one another then," Elric murmured despairingly. "Bound by hell-forged chains and fate-haunted circumstance. Well, then - let it be thus so - and men will have cause to tremble and flee when they hear the names of Elric of Melinbone and Stormbringer, his sword. We are two of a kind - produced by an age which has deserted us. Let us give this age cause to hate us!

women of exotic appearance.

Therefore it seemed a dreadful injustice that these wise races should perish at the hands of creatures who were still little more than animals. It was as if vultures feasted on and squabbled over the paralyzed body of the youthful poet who could only stare at them with puzzled eyes as they slowly robbed him of an exquisite existence they would never appreciate, never know they were taking.

The albino found himself brooding upon the nature of all unholy bargains, of his own dependency upon the hellsword Stormbringer, of his willingness to summon supernatural aid without thought of any spiritual consequences to himself and, perhaps most significant, of his unwillingness to find a way to cure himself of the occult's seductive attraction; for there was a part of his strange brain that was curious to follow its own fate; to learn whatever disastrous conclusion lay in store for it - it needed to know the end of the saga: the value, perhaps, of its torment.

In many ways the recent history of the Ukraine can be seen as an intensified version of the history of our era. Most of the political issues are familiar to us. Most of the methods used to meet those issues are also familiar. Events in the Ukraine prefigured events through the rest of the world ...

I am a thousand time more evil than thou!

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

She had always been beautiful in his eyes, and admirable, too. He had worshipped her, in some ways, for her courage in adversity, for her resistance to the ways of his own world. But that had been bravery under siege and now, it seemed, she single-handedly gave siege to the same society which, a few months before, had threatened to engulf and destroy her identity. There was a determination in her bearing, a lightness, an air of confidence, that proclaimed to everyone what he had always sensed in her - and he was proud that his world should see her as the woman he knew, in full command of herself and her situation. Yet there was, as well, a private knowledge, an intimate understanding between them, of the resources of character on which she drew to achieve that command. For the first time he became conscious of the depth of his love for her and, although he had always known that she had loved him, he became confident that her emotion was as strong as his own. Like her, he required no declaration; her bearing was declaration enough.
Together, they ascended.

It happens to many like that," he said. "I have seen them. But you have to show them so much injustice first ... Nobody wants to believe that the world is cruel - or that one's own kind are cruel. Not to know cruelty is to remain innocent, eh? And we should all like to remain innocent. A revolutionist is a man who, perhaps, fails to keep his innocence but so desperately wants it back that he seeks to create a world where all shall be innocent in that way.

I suppose it was a mistake to sketch in a background for the movie, in which I described a likely mix of people in a late-Roman settlement, amongst them people from Africa and the Near East. 'You mean they had black people back then!' was actually what my boss exclaimed when he read that. 'Could Lancelot's sidekick be black?

Time is the enemy of identity

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

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

His little black-and-white cat with the black-and-white wings would fly through the rooms sometimes, but most often it would be discovered sleeping somewhere where it was most inconvenient for it to sleep. And

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

Our Di had, according to her myth, been hounded to death by the baying werewolves of the yellow press. Of course it was now plain I was one. Maybe even the worst of them. Some people claimed they had actually seen me baying. In the tunnel. With the blood of their angel on my hands.

Here, I thought, I had found the human race in its final stages of decadence perverse, insouciant, without ambition. And I could not blame them. After all, they had no future.

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

He was talking about hire purchase. precredit cards. A different way of getting the poor into debt, but I think he was right. It was nice when ordinary people could take a holiday in Spain, of course, but easy credit is what started the cultural rot. Tourism depends on lots of people everywhere with loads of disposable wealth, which means all kinds of changes through a place a cultivates it. The real, messy, informative past disappears to be overlaid with bad fiction, with simplified folklore, easy answers. Memory needs to remain complex, debatable. Without those qualities it is mere nostalgic sentimentality. Commodified identity. Souls bough and sold.

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.

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

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

Now Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a thousand reverses ocurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand other creatures for an instant, and where he lived through more than ten other lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him; and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his sanity.

Leda: 'I would rather become an international adventuress and bring down kings and emperors.'

Maxim: 'But this is the age of republics and democracies. It's much harder to seduce a committee.

Everything means nothing that is the only truth.

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

The note took long moments to fade and, when it had at last died away, there was an absolute hush over the world, the milling millions were still, there was an air of expectancy. And then the White Lords came.

A moment later, the world's first all-purpose human being strode eastward, whistling.
'A tasty world,' it reflected cheerfully. 'A very tasty world.'
'You said it, Cornelius!

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.

Then Lu Wing entered, no longer in chauffeur's uniform but wearing a high-buttoned, deep blue silk tunic, an entourage of smooth, modern men of south China at his heels, ready, I heard him say, to do any further work required of them. The conversation turned to a more distant moment when his father died and he would claim the crown of the Wing emirates, to rule over a subcontinent and its colonies again. Sending his men off, he said, upon their errands and to visit their many relatives in Limehouse, Lu Wing leaned against the bar, as relaxed as he had probably been during his student days at Oxford.

Then the earth grew old, its landscapes mellowing and showing signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner of a man in his last years ...

Yet without Chaos there would be no Creation, and perhaps no Creator. That is the simple truth of all existence, Lord Elric. The promise of immortality.

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

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

I'd started doing fanzines from the age of nine. I'd been doing as many copies as you can get carbon paper into an upright typewriter, and I'd try to sell them at school.

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!

I really did have a very egalitarian upbringing.

And now, Elric had told three lies. The first concerned his cousin Yyrkoon. The second concerned the Black Sword. The third concerned Cymoril. And upon those three lies was Elric's destiny to be built, for it is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.

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.

I had this funny family. At one end, they were breeding dogs in south-east London - for greyhound racing - and at the other, my uncle was living in Downing Street. And I would actually go to Downing Street, which didn't strike me as funny. I'd get on the number 15 bus.

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

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

'No one lives in Ameeron by choice.'A veritable City of the Damned.'As the poet might remark, aye.' Rackhir offered Elric a sardonic wink. 'But I sometimes think all cities are that.'

Relaxed, I lit a spliff.

Memory is the foundation of identity. Through our sense of identity, we act. We determine our moral judgements. We rewrite our own memories, of course, all the time. We create fresh narratives to use in our survival. We agree on fresh histories enabling us to take action. It is part of what makes us such flawed creatures. Creatures of such narrative fiction creating cause and effect.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

IT IS THE colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby.

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

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

Time is a dream - or a nightmare - from which there is never any waking. We who travel in Time are dreamers who occasionally share a common experience.

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

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

You Mabden seem to think that happiness must be bought with misery ... It is not easy for Vadhagh to understand that. We believe
believed
that happiness was a natural condition of reasoning beings.

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

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

It was a world ruled these days by the gun, the guitar, and the needle, sexier than sex, where the good right hand had become the male's primary sexual organ ...

You make the mistake of considering Christianity as something that developed over the course of a few years, from the death of Jesus to the time the gospels were written. But Christianity wasn't new. Only the name was new. Christianity was merely a stage in the meeting, cross-fertilization, metamorphosis of Western logic and Eastern mysticism. Look how the religion itself changed over the centuries, reinterpreting itself to meet changing times. Christianity is just a new name for a conglomeration of old myths and philosophies. All the gospels do is retell the sun myth and garble some of the ideas from the Greeks and Romans.

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

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

Who told you that the world was just?' Elric

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

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