Top 70 Michael Moorcock Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Time is the enemy of identity.”

— Michael Moorcock

3. “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

4. “Everything means nothing that is the only truth.”

— Michael Moorcock

5. “The past is a script we are constantly rewriting.”

— Michael Moorcock

6. “Religion was the creation of fear. Knowledge destroys fear. Without fear, religion can’t survive.”

— Michael Moorcock

7. “Destiny’s Champion, Fate’s fool. Eternity’s Soldier, Time’s Tool.”

— Michael Moorcock

8. “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

9. “There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.”

— Michael Moorcock

10. “The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.”

— Michael Moorcock

11. “Treasures are not won by care and forethought but by swift slaying and reckless attack.”

— Michael Moorcock

12. “We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress.”

— Michael Moorcock

14. “I have brought evil to many places,” he said, “but usually there has already been evil to match mine. I seek no excuses, for I know what I am and I know what I have done. I have slain malignant sorcerers and destroyed oppressors, but I have also been responsible for slaying fine men, and a woman, my cousin, whom I loved, I killed – or my sword did.”

— Michael Moorcock

15. “We must be bound to one another then,” Elric murmured despairingly. “Bound by hell-forged chains and fate-haunted circumstance. Well, then – let it be thus so – and men will have cause to tremble and flee when they hear the names of Elric of Melinbone and Stormbringer, his sword. We are two of a kind – produced by an age which has deserted us. Let us give this age cause to hate us!”

— Michael Moorcock

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful.”

— Michael Moorcock

20. “I think the notion of worldbuilding is a failure of literary sophistication.”

— Michael Moorcock

21. “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

22. “The subtlest lie of all is the full truth.”

— Michael Moorcock

23. “Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.”

— Michael Moorcock

24. “Is the prisoner a prisoner because he lives in a cage or because he knows that he lives in a cage?”

— Michael Moorcock

25. “The problems for which I could find no solution in fact had no solution.”

— Michael Moorcock

26. “One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired The Lord of the Rings.”

— Michael Moorcock

27. “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

28. “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

29. “If we are the toys of the gods are not perhaps the gods themselves mere children?”

— Michael Moorcock

30. “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

31. “It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.”

— Michael Moorcock

32. “Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.”

— Michael Moorcock

33. “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

34. “It is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.”

— Michael Moorcock

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “People are not alarmed by the unusual so long as it is placed in an acceptable context.”

— Michael Moorcock

39. “Therefore it seemed a dreadful injustice that these wise races should perish at the hands of creatures who were still little more than animals. It was as if vultures feasted on and squabbled over the paralyzed body of the youthful poet who could only stare at them with puzzled eyes as they slowly robbed him of an exquisite existence they would never appreciate, never know they were taking.”

— Michael Moorcock

40. “We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.”

— Michael Moorcock

41. “There is less danger, gentlemen, in living according to a set of high moral principles than most politicians believe.”

— Michael Moorcock

42. “They offer you so much power. All that patriarchy! So tempting to take advantage of it.”

— Michael Moorcock

43. “I have hated hypocrisy and deception all my life, yet all my life I have been victim to it. That is the terrible irony.”

— Michael Moorcock

44. “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

45. “Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that’s fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory’s ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ – people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don’t want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.”

— Michael Moorcock

46. “It happens to many like that,” he said. “I have seen them. But you have to show them so much injustice first... Nobody wants to believe that the world is cruel – or that one’s own kind are cruel. Not to know cruelty is to remain innocent, eh? And we should all like to remain innocent. A revolutionist is a man who, perhaps, fails to keep his innocence but so desperately wants it back that he seeks to create a world where all shall be innocent in that way.”

— Michael Moorcock

47. “It’s History that’s caused all the troubles in the past.”

— Michael Moorcock

48. “I have sometimes wondered what social stability is. It is probably just a question of points of view and personal experience.”

— Michael Moorcock

49. “I cannot justify my actions. Roldero had said that men must be judged by their deeds, not their motives. I offer such speculation only n the hope that by understanding our motives we may thus control our deeds.”

— Michael Moorcock

50. “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