Top 61 Leiber Quotes
#1. ...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...
Stephen King
#2. I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!
Fritz Leiber
#3. Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance - which their power protected.
Fritz Leiber
#4. Ningauble shrugged. You're a hero. You should know.
Fritz Leiber
#5. Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.
Fritz Leiber
#6. After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind.
Fritz Leiber
#7. Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them.
Fritz Leiber
#8. I have a few customers who have two or three hundred bags. When you see a lady carrying a little dog bag or a little cat bag or an egg, it makes you happy.
Judith Leiber
#10. The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That's why they're the gods! I told you they were devils.
Fritz Leiber
#11. Also, in the dismal Cold Waste, any man treasures illusions, though knowing them almost certainly to be such.
Fritz Leiber
#12. Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.
Jerry Leiber
#13. What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love.
Fritz Leiber
#14. A good earthy witch is more honest than some city rogue tricked out in black cone-hat and robe of stars,
Fritz Leiber
#15. I heard this music coming out of the radio and it was 'Ain't Nobody's Business.' It got me. I thought, 'I can do this.' I decided just like that. No romantic story.
Jerry Leiber
#16. Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.
Fritz Leiber
#17. It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.
Jerry Leiber
#18. Elvis was incredibly cooperative. He would try anything. He wasn't a diva, no prima donna. When it came to work, he was a workhorse.
Jerry Leiber
#19. I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.
Jerry Leiber
#20. He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.
Fritz Leiber
#21. There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.
Fritz Leiber
#22. There was always something new to be seen in the unchanging night sky.
Fritz Leiber
#23. If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat.
Fritz Leiber
#24. Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.
Fritz Leiber
#25. The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there'd be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted.
Jerry Leiber
#26. I always had a good dexterity. The story in my family goes that at the age of 3 I could thread needles faster than anybody.
Judith Leiber
#27. At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites - milky ovals infinitely eerie in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips.
Fritz Leiber
#28. We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness.
Fritz Leiber
#29. Elvis Presley, you can't define him in a couple of sentences, but he was a country boy and he was very respectful.
Jerry Leiber
#30. I'll never stop writing. It's one occupation in which being crazy, even senile, might help.
Fritz Leiber
#31. Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead.
Fritz Leiber
#32. Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world.
Fritz Leiber
#33. Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That's marketing. Why couldn't it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn't change. The song didn't change. It was still 'Yakety Yak' and 'Searchin'.'
Jerry Leiber
#34. 'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.
Jerry Leiber
#35. I ask you now, is any little thing like being damned eternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?
Fritz Leiber
#36. Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.
Fritz Leiber
#38. It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost")
Fritz Leiber
#39. The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.
Jerry Leiber
#40. The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die. These aims are hateful to the government, which values ever frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright.
Fritz Leiber
#41. There we were, a small bunch of rather bright and fortunate young people, thinking ourselves somehow special and exceptional, but really very naive.
Fritz Leiber
#42. Listen to any cantor, any good hazan, sing and you can hear a little bit of Ray Charles going on.
Jerry Leiber
#43. Things are different from what I thought. They're much worse.
Fritz Leiber
#45. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers, and everything else worthwhile. And that's as true for the last man as the first.
Fritz Leiber
#46. A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.
Fritz Leiber
#48. Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power ... It is a place of dreams, not only the tinseled ones ...
Fritz Leiber
#49. And there's always one special element. In 'There Goes My Baby,' it's the out-of-tune timpani. 'Stand by Me,' it's the bass pattern. Of course, all the elements come together to make a great record. But there's always one standout.
Jerry Leiber
#50. Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy , looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.
Fritz Leiber
#51. From all around came very faintly a low sad hum, as the unhoused bees mourned.
Fritz Leiber
#52. Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.
Fritz Leiber
#53. I have a good sense of humor. I think everything we do should have whimsy in it.
Judith Leiber
#54. I was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black and we spoke black. When I was a kid growing up, where I came from, it was hip to be black. To be white was kind of square.
Jerry Leiber
#55. Do you think the saucer actually had an inertialess drive - like E. E. Smith's bergenholms or something?" Harry McHeath asked Doc. "Have to, I'd think, the way it was jumping around. In a situation like this, science fiction is our only guide. On the other hand -
Fritz Leiber
#56. I am not pushy. You want it, you buy it. Most people hit the customer over the head. But if you're too self-important, it's kind of repellent.
Judith Leiber
#57. Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.
Fritz Leiber
#58. Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.
Jerry Leiber
#59. What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?
Fritz Leiber
#60. Teenagers especially are very, very conscious about what is hip and what is lame and what is square and what is out and what is in, you know. And, I mean, I grew up right there in the middle of a black culture. And I knew dead-on what it was.
Jerry Leiber
#61. Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.
Fritz Leiber
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