Top 92 Michael Moorcock Quotes
#1. When I had first been hurled into the world of the 1970s I had thought I found Utopia. And now I was discovering that it was only a Utopia for some. Shaw wanted a Utopia which would exist for all.
Michael Moorcock
#2. The mask of kindly patronage had dropped away to show the hatred and the fear beneath.
Michael Moorcock
#3. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#4. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#5. Death is the promise we're all born with, sir. A good
death is better than a poor one.
Michael Moorcock
#6. 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 ...
Michael Moorcock
#7. 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 ...
Michael Moorcock
#8. Is the prisoner a prisoner because he lives in a cage or because he knows that he lives in a cage?
Michael Moorcock
#9. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#10. 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!
Michael Moorcock
#11. At which Charion Pratt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices made by lovers.
Michael Moorcock
#12. I know not which I prefer the look of - those who attack us or that which defends us!
Michael Moorcock
#13. For this was the other thing that Elric knew: that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance.
Michael Moorcock
#14. Corum knew that he was mad, in Vadhagh terms. But he supposed that he was sane enough in Mabden terms. And this was, after all, now a Mabden world. He must learn to accept its peculiar disorders as normal, if he were going to survive.
Michael Moorcock
#15. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#16. Our scientific advances will be merely obscene unless they help the large part of our world's population emerge from miserable uncertainty and debilitating terror.
Michael Moorcock
#17. We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.
Michael Moorcock
#18. 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
Michael Moorcock
#19. Man can live by bread alone when all his energies are devoted to attaining that bread, but once his mind is clear, once he has ceased to labour through all his waking hours to find food, then he begins to think.
Michael Moorcock
#20. he cursed the malevolent Gods for the black day when idly, for their amusement, they had spawned men.
Michael Moorcock
#21. She had enjoyed a phase where she found it easier to divide herself and argue, as it were, face to face, than to attempt to arrange her thoughts in the conventional manner.
Michael Moorcock
#22. Man may trust man, Prince Elric, but perhaps we'll never have a truly sane world until men learn to trust mankind. That would mean the death of magic, I think.
Michael Moorcock
#23. There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.
Michael Moorcock
#24. I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.
Michael Moorcock
#25. The Lords of Chaos are
the enemies of Logic,
the jugglers of Truth,
the molders of Beauty
Michael Moorcock
#26. Ah, the world was ever so. How sad are heroes when their tasks are done ...
Michael Moorcock
#27. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#29. It's getting late. I must return to my ship or my men will think I've drowned and be celebrating.
Michael Moorcock
#30. Religion was the creation of fear. Knowledge destroys fear. Without fear, religion can't survive.
Michael Moorcock
#31. Yet the place was strangely old-fashioned. The strongest feeling I got from New York at first was nostalgia. A 1930s vision of the future.
Michael Moorcock
#33. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#34. 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!
Michael Moorcock
#35. He combed his milk-white hair and crooned a tune to himself, clipped on his yellow chamois shoulder holster and stepped out into the soft night and his smooth car.
As he drove, he considered the stars. It would all be over in a flash.
Michael Moorcock
#36. Treasures are not won by care and forethought
but by swift slaying and reckless attack.
Michael Moorcock
#37. Man was not born to a world of justice. But he can create such a world!
Michael Moorcock
#38. On such ventures as these one is
inclined to forget much, as one forgets a dream.
Michael Moorcock
#39. They offer you so much power. All that patriarchy! So tempting to take advantage of it.
Michael Moorcock
#40. I walk the moonbeam roads a silver web connecting the many worlds of the Multiverse.
Michael Moorcock
#41. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#43. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#44. People are not alarmed by the unusual so long as it is placed in an acceptable context.
Michael Moorcock
#45. 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!
Michael Moorcock
#46. P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.
Michael Moorcock
#48. I have a kind of innate sense of structure, which also makes me a good mimic.
Michael Moorcock
#50. It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.
Michael Moorcock
#51. Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.
Michael Moorcock
#52. I come from an almost wholly secular background and have no quarrel with religion.
Michael Moorcock
#53. a society dedicated solely to the preservation of her past, soon has only her past to sell.
Michael Moorcock
#54. I think the notion of worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication.
Michael Moorcock
#56. Elric offered Moonglum a smile that had gratitude in it. You are - a good friend - I wonder why ...
Michael Moorcock
#57. 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?
Michael Moorcock
#58. This gentleman is known the width and breadth of the comics world as that bastard Klaw.
Michael Moorcock
#59. 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 ...
Michael Moorcock
#60. I can accept then, that we are more than forsaken, because there was never anything there to forsake us.
Michael Moorcock
#61. The legends which offer a race their sense of pride and history eventually become putrid.
Michael Moorcock
#62. There is less danger, gentlemen, in living according to a set of high moral principles than most politicians believe.
Michael Moorcock
#63. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#64. Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!
Michael Moorcock
#66. We would all be better off dead, useless eaters of the lotus that we are.
Michael Moorcock
#67. All Empires fall, All ages die, All strife shall be in vain. All Kings go down, All hope must fail, But Tanelorn remains Our Tanelorn remains ...
Michael Moorcock
#68. What happened to fantasy for me is what also happened to rock and roll. It found a common denominator for making maximum money. As a result, it lost its tensions, its anger, its edginess and turned into one big cup of cocoa.
Michael Moorcock
#71. Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.
Michael Moorcock
#72. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#74. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#75. 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?
Michael Moorcock
#76. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#77. But people may do great good accidentally, though with evil intentions - conversely people may do great evil though having the best of intentions.
Michael Moorcock
#78. I have sometimes wondered what social stability is. It is probably just a question of points of view and personal experience.
Michael Moorcock
#79. Why should their pain produce such marvelous beauty? he wonders. Or is all beauty created through pain? Is that the secret of great art, both human and Melnibonen?
Michael Moorcock
#80. '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.'
Michael Moorcock
#81. 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
Michael Moorcock
#82. There was certainly much to be said for being at the mercy of the primeval elements, to be swept along by circumstances one could not in any way control, but it was good to return, to feel one's identity expand again, unchecked.
Michael Moorcock
#83. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#84. The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.
Michael Moorcock
#85. The problems for which I could find no solution in fact had no solution.
Michael Moorcock
#86. When gods die, self-respect buds', murmured Orland Fank. 'Gods and their examples are not needed by those who respect themselves and, consequently, respect others. Gods are for children, for little, fearful people, for those who would have no responsibility to themselves or their fellows.
Michael Moorcock
#87. Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful
Michael Moorcock
#88. We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress.
Michael Moorcock
#90. By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.
Michael Moorcock
#91. 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.
Michael Moorcock
#92. One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired The Lord of the Rings.
Michael Moorcock
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