Michael Moorcock
229 quotes
Biography
"I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas."
"It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity."
"Everything means nothing—that is the only truth."
"The subtlest lie of all is the full truth."
"He laughed. Clearly the idea of the governor intervening on behalf of an ordinary member of the public amused him."
"I think the human race has rather foolishly cancelled many of its options."
"Hard labour is a wonderful cure for neurosis!"
"I appreciated his attempt at a neutral tone, given his evident distaste for matter psychic and mystical. We shared, I think, a similar outlook."
"When confused, men turn to war and women to magic."
"The Reens, the flying saucer people, were used by the hippies as an explanation for everything they couldn't understand. In rejecting Science, they had substituted only a banal myth."
"He turned his eyes back to the river which seemed almost to obsess him. “Look at the Nile. An open sewer running through a desert. What has Egypt done to deserve rescue? She gave the world the ancestors who first offered Nature a serious challenge. Should we be grateful for that? From Lake Nasser to Alexandria the river remains undrinkable and frequently unusable. She once replenished the Earth. Now, work with their fertilisers and sprays, she helps poison it.”"
"“We never accepted, thank God, the conventional wisdoms of psychiatry. And madness here, as elsewhere, is defined by the people in power, usually calling themselves the State. Tomorrow those power holders could be overthrown by a fresh dynasty and what was yesterday simple common sense today becomes irresponsible folly. So I do not like to make hasty judgements or pronounce readily on others’ moral or mental condition—lest, indeed, we inadvertently condemn ourselves.” He paused. “They say this was not so under the British, but it was fairer, more predictable. Only real troublemakers and criminals went to jail. Now it isn't as bad as it was when I was a lad. Then anyone was liable to arrest. If it was better under the British, then that is our shame.”"
"True madness, like true evil, I had been informed once, was always characterised by its banality."
"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."
"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."
"“You only need fear the bees if you’ve broken the law.” That familiar phrase was used to justify every encroachment on citizens’ liberty."
"Wasn’t all their effort worthless? Wouldn’t it be better to accept the impossibility of their mission? He began to think Krane was mad. If there were a threat, then inevitably they would die. 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? In those terms, the whole history of their species lasted for less than a fraction of a second. And then, sheltering beside him under the protection of the energy equalizer, she looked up for a second, and, obscurely, he understood that the effort always would be worth it. Always had been worth it."
"You fail to understand, my friend. We do not control time. If anything, it controls us. We simply measure it."
"Time and Matter are both ideas. Matter makes a more immediate impression on Man, but Time’s effects are longer lasting."
"“Your yearning, Pepin Hunchback, is not for the past as it was,” she was saying softly. “It is for a world that never existed—a Paradise, a Golden Age. Men have always spoken of such a time in history—but such an idyllic world is a yearning for childhood, not the past, for lost innocence. It is childhood we wish to return to.”"
"She opened her bag and made sure of her jar of instant coffee. It was the one thing she couldn’t get at the End of Time."
"Like so many others he seemed to equate self-pity with artistic inspiration. In an earlier age he might have discovered his public and become quite rich (self-pity passing for passion in the popular understanding)."
"The Dead God’s Book and the Golden Barge are one and the same. They have no real existence, save in the wishful imagination of mankind. There is, the story says, no Holy Grail which will transform a man overnight from bewildered ignorance to complete knowledge—the answer already is within him, if he cares to train himself to find it. A rather overemphasised fact, throughout history, but one generally ignored all the same."
"Again this is an old question, a bit trite from being asked too often, maybe, but how much of what we believe is true and how much is what we wish were true."
"Perhaps he was old and wise, perhaps he was just old."