American writer (1937-1995)
When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Trumps of Doom
My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.
ROGER ZELAZNY
interview, Phlogiston, 1995
The headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Prince of Chaos
I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn't sound like much but it's kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you're going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You're going to say "Oh boy!" and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page. But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've moved as far as I have."
ROGER ZELAZNY
interview, Phlogiston, 1995
I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Courts of Chaos
Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Blood of Amber
The stars blazed like the love of God, cold and distant.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Isle of the Dead
The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.
ROGER ZELAZNY
This Immortal
I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not--so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Isle of the Dead
Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today.
ROGER ZELAZNY
He Who Shapes
Go and copulate with yon purple lizard.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Creatures of Light and Darkness
There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Creatures of Light and Darkness
You are a fool to speak of last great battles ... for the last great battle is always the next one.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
I guess you have to be a little arrogant to be a writer. I decided early on that just because a lot of other writers were bothered by getting bad reviews didn't really mean that the things were particularly important. By the same token, the good ones didn't mean all that much either. So I just forget about reviews and I wrote what I wanted.
ROGER ZELAZNY
interview, Absolute Magnitude
It seems in other ways, in some respects, that the mainstream authors are tending to use more and more science fiction notions. But their books aren't really classified as science fiction and I suppose they're not because they're also doing other things. I personally feel that it is going to stay a thing apart, that it will undergo vogues, as it were. I think there will be periods when it's more highly regarded and then it will slip back again. It seems throughout what I've seen of its history that it's been a cyclic pattern--it rises to prominence for a time. Something will set it off briefly, like the space programme or, well just recently a couple of good movies that got a lot of attention back in the States, like Star Wars and Close Encounters -- and science fiction books become very popular. Then, of course, everyone will jump on the movie band-wagon and produce a crop of grade-B movies, and they'll sink, and then people will slip back to reading other things. But there's a certain residuum that remains.
ROGER ZELAZNY
"A Conversation with Roger Zelazny", Science Fiction, Apr. 8, 1978
The dead are too much with us.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Isle of the Dead
When I said I wanted to die in my sleep, I meant I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Great Book of Amber
Time passed slowly, like an old man climbing a hill.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
All of these things considered, it is not surprising that one can detect echoes, correspondences and even an eternal return or two within the work of a single author. The passage of time does bring changes, yea and alas; but still, I would recognize myself anywhere.
ROGER ZELAZNY
introduction, Unicorn Variations