Top 70 Michael Moorcock Quotes (2024 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. “There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.”

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

20. “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

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

26. “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

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

— Michael Moorcock

29. “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

30. “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

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. “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

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

36. “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

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

— Michael Moorcock

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

— Michael Moorcock

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

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

— Michael Moorcock

45. “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

46. “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

47. “The legends which offer a race their sense of pride and history eventually become putrid.”

— Michael Moorcock

48. “It’s getting late. I must return to my ship or my men will think I’ve drowned and be celebrating.”

— Michael Moorcock

49. “Ah, the world was ever so. How sad are heroes when their tasks are done...”

— Michael Moorcock

50. “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