Top 90 Piers Anthony Quotes
#2. When you have something you would die to protect it ceases to be a matter of courage." Niobe explained, "You just know what you have to do and you can't afford fear.
Piers Anthony
#3. When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.
Piers Anthony
#4. All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.
Piers Anthony
#5. The library is a place of mental diversion, learning, and comfort for anyone who has an intellect. I know of no librarian who when asked for food for the mind will offer a stone. What more could anyone ask?
Piers Anthony
#6. I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.
Piers Anthony
#7. By all means. Swords have ever been the best servants of crazy men.
Piers Anthony
#8. Your teacher didn't lie to you. A centaur never lies. He merely edited his information, on orders from the King, so as not to force on the impressionable minds of children things their parents did not want them to hear. Education has ever been thus.
Piers Anthony
#9. The sweetest temptation could be that which was known to be the most foolish.
Piers Anthony
#10. But one must go where one's road leads, even when it's a distressing road.
Piers Anthony
#11. Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!
Piers Anthony
#12. Decent folk had to let indecent folk do their thing; that was the paradox of decency.
Piers Anthony
#13. The biggest fool is the one who thinks he knows it all.
Piers Anthony
#14. Now it was done. He was free of Xanth forever. Free to make his own life, without being ridiculed or mothered or tempted. Free to be himself.
Bink put his face in his hands and cried.
Piers Anthony
#15. Dor shook his head. Such mysteries were beyond his fathoming. All he could do was ... what he could do.
Piers Anthony
#16. Terry Pratchett's right up my alley ... give him a try!
Piers Anthony
#17. For our stories are not yet finished, and perhaps will never be.
Piers Anthony
#18. She looked around. "Oh, I've just got to hug somebody! You!" And she hugged Puck, the little ghost horse. "And you." She hugged Pook, and Peek, and even the nose of the moat monster. "But not you," she decided, encountering the zombie.
Piers Anthony
#19. At first I was exhilarated by my freedom from the responsibility of the kingship. This lasted about seven minutes. I was also depressed by my freedom from marriage, for I had become accustomed to the attentions of a woman. This lasted about nine minutes. Then I was bored.
Piers Anthony
#21. Hell hath little fury like that of a critic who sees a writer make it big.
Piers Anthony
#22. Keep writing, because not only does practice improve skill, it gives you more chances to score on the market. I did that for eight years before making my first sale.
Piers Anthony
#23. What splendor nature proffered to the eye of any man who had half the wit to appreciate it!
Piers Anthony
#24. Not any more. Not according to Glory Goblin or Brontes the Cyclops. Imbri merely confirms that Hugo has perfected his talent, and is now a good deal smarter and handsomer than before. A woman has to be responsible.
Piers Anthony
#25. Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.
Piers Anthony
#27. I wish my readers took less of my time - about a third of my working time goes to them - but I love and need them all.
Piers Anthony
#28. I don't care how the sin ledger stands. There seem to be a number of artificial standards of good and evil that don't really relate to true merit or demerit. Maybe the official system of classification has failed to keep up with the changing nature of our society.
Piers Anthony
#29. I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.
Piers Anthony
#30. At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails.
Piers Anthony
#31. What is life, except an ongoing instinct for survival? Nature uses that instinct to make us perform; otherwise we would all relax, and the species would disappear. Nature is a cruel green mother. The survival instinct is a goad, not a privilege.
Piers Anthony
#32. I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.
Piers Anthony
#33. If every editor turns you down, maybe you should take a second look at your text, however, just in case.
Piers Anthony
#34. Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done - that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.
Piers Anthony
#35. It is the man who can't be trusted who does not trust others because he judges them by himself.
Piers Anthony
#36. A mortal person's mind is like a wilderness, with a tremendous volume of decaying constructs and half-understood experience forming natural harbors for wild animal effects.
Piers Anthony
#37. Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series also shows the potential of lighter fantastic fiction. I read the first, and listened to a tape of a later one, and it's fun.
Piers Anthony
#38. We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.
Piers Anthony
#39. Bink knew the dolphin only from old pictures; it was a kind of magic fish that breathed air instead of water.
Piers Anthony
#40. Have a working spouse, because you won't earn a living from writing - not at first, if ever. My wife worked for years to support us.
Piers Anthony
#41. One reason I don't suffer Writer's Block is that I don't wait on the muse, I summon it at need.
Piers Anthony
#42. That most dangerous of opponents: the one who took pains to comprehend the position of his adversary.
Piers Anthony
#44. What kind of fool had he been, to throw away romance untried?
Piers Anthony
#45. Never thought I'd see the day when Death was denied. That leaves taxes as the only certainty.
Piers Anthony
#46. One day you'll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless.
Piers Anthony
#47. Why did things have to be so complicated with human beings? ... Yet if we were not what we were, creatures with at least the awareness of purpose and honor, what would we be? Empty knights in armor, seeming so strong on the outside, yet hollow inside?
Piers Anthony
#48. God created the earth but the Devil evolved it.
Piers Anthony
#49. I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers.
Piers Anthony
#50. Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.
Piers Anthony
#51. But I don't read or listen for pleasure. I have too much else to do.
Piers Anthony
#52. Dor woke again as dawn came. The sun had somehow gotten around to the east, where the land was, and dried off so that it could shine again.
Piers Anthony
#53. People talk
they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.
Piers Anthony
#54. If the fiercest conglomerate monsters had souls, with all that implied, who could condemn them as evil?
Piers Anthony
#55. A good notion for a novel is far too precious to waste; it must be caught the moment it flashes into mental view, or it will escape to the brain of some other writer who really doesn't deserve it.
Piers Anthony
#56. As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.
Piers Anthony
#57. When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.
Piers Anthony
#58. It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
Piers Anthony
#59. I think that man was half-right. He is better off out of the game - but the game may not be better off without him. A man should not exist for himself alone. Life made an investment in him, and that investment was not paid off.
Piers Anthony
#60. In fact, I believe that we need better sex education in our own culture, here in America, so that young folk learn about things like venereal disease before they encounter it.
Piers Anthony
#61. You don't have to settle for what you are at this moment. You can work to make a difference.
Chex
Piers Anthony
#62. Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.
Piers Anthony
#63. Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.
Piers Anthony
#64. SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
Piers Anthony
#65. When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.
Piers Anthony
#66. Be what you are; it is better that way.
--Dolph
Piers Anthony
#67. I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth.
Piers Anthony
#68. I have, as may be apparent, not much respect for editors as a class.
Piers Anthony
#69. Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?
Then, leave me to my foolishness.
Piers Anthony
#70. Now you must excuse your Raja for he must suffer to give audience to the prince of Punt, a pompous old fool, who believes that his frequent flatulencies are the echoes of the Gods applauding his non sequiturs.
Piers Anthony
#71. I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.
Piers Anthony
#72. Barbarian
A Code of Conduct honored by all true barbarian warriors, requiring excellent coordination with weapons, closeness to nature, awkwardness with women, common sense, and completion of the mission.
Piers Anthony
#73. The man glanced up. "Hello. Tweeter tells me you're Kody, a fellow Mundanian, newly arrived, and you want to compare notes." "Uh, yes, in essence," Kody agreed, taken aback. All that from one tweet? Well, maybe it did fit within 140 characters.
Piers Anthony
#74. No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.
Piers Anthony
#75. Enough , you hens!" Niobe exploded. "It's tentative!"
Lachesis snorted "As tentative as a pregnancy,girl!
Piers Anthony
#76. I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.
Piers Anthony
#77. Every person professes to love good and hate evil, but in his actions his real preferences emerges.
Piers Anthony
#78. Writers pay a lot of attention to wordage, because some publishers seem to care more about length than about quality and will automatically reject novels that don't fit their narrow standards of length - or will chop out extra wordage to make a novel fit.
Piers Anthony
#79. I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that.
Piers Anthony
#80. At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.
Piers Anthony
#82. What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don't want collaborations regardless of their merit.
Piers Anthony
#83. Come try my strength, you dogs who thought to attack helpless prey! But when you do, O beasts of night, know that you face the Lord of Night. I am Death!
Piers Anthony
#84. Evil can never touch the person who refuses to accept it.
Piers Anthony
#85. Yes, I'm always hungry after a fatal injury.
Jordan
Piers Anthony
#86. She would have to ride the nightmare in her sleep. Only that would keep it material, or enable her to dematerialize with it.
Piers Anthony
#87. I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.
Piers Anthony
#88. Do you seek to bribe Death? Zane asked, half angry and two-thirds curious.
Piers Anthony
#89. But I've been dead much longer than I lived, and I have had the chance to educate myself in that that I lacked in life. I wasn't stupid when I lived, just ignorant. There's a lot to learn, simply by watching the follies of the living.
Piers Anthony
#90. Adults had the notion that juveniles needed to suffer. Only when they had suffered enough to wipe out most of their naturally joyous spirits and innocence were they staid enough to be considered mature. An adult was essentially a broken-down child.
Piers Anthony
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