Top 80 Piers Anthony Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The biggest fool is the one who thinks he knows it all.”

— Piers Anthony

2. “Information is power. – Humfrey.”

— Piers Anthony

3. “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

4. “One day you’ll discover that the opinions of worthless people are worthless.”

— Piers Anthony

5. “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

6. “Every person professes to love good and hate evil, but in his actions his real preferences emerges.”

— Piers Anthony

7. “People talk – they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.”

— Piers Anthony

8. “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

9. “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

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10. “SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.”

— Piers Anthony

11. “For our stories are not yet finished, and perhaps will never be.”

— Piers Anthony

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

12. “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

13. “All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.”

— Piers Anthony

14. “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

15. “Be what you are; it is better that way. – Dolph.”

— Piers Anthony

16. “That most dangerous of opponents: the one who took pains to comprehend the position of his adversary.”

— Piers Anthony

17. “Man is the one creature on Earth who knows he will die, and that is an appalling intellectual burden.”

— Piers Anthony

18. “A horse is wonderful by definition.”

— Piers Anthony

19. “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

20. “Evil can never touch the person who refuses to accept it.”

— Piers Anthony

21. “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

22. “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

23. “At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails.”

— Piers Anthony

24. “It is the untrustworthy man who distrusts others, because he judges them by himself.”

— Piers Anthony

25. “Bink knew the dolphin only from old pictures; it was a kind of magic fish that breathed air instead of water.”

— Piers Anthony

26. “How many people similarly spent their lives searching for their own spells – some gratuitous benefit such as a silver tree or political power or undeserved acclaim – when all they really needed was to be satisfied with what they already had? Sometimes what they had was better than what they thought they wanted.”

— Piers Anthony

27. “It is the man who can’t be trusted who does not trust others because he judges them by himself.”

— Piers Anthony

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Never thought I’d see the day when Death was denied. That leaves taxes as the only certainty.”

— Piers Anthony

31. “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

32. “We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.”

— Piers Anthony

33. “It was said that familiarity bred contempt, but surely ignorance bred error.”

— Piers Anthony

34. “Obviously it could be, because it was.”

— Piers Anthony

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Do you seek to bribe Death?” Zane asked, half angry and two-thirds curious.”

— Piers Anthony

39. “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

40. “William Henley put it: It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

— Piers Anthony

41. “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

42. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

43. “If the fiercest conglomerate monsters had souls, with all that implied, who could condemn them as evil?”

— Piers Anthony

44. “Wenda’s chest and hips shrank, her shoulders and arms turned muscular and her body became lean and hard where it had been rounded and soft. The hair of her head shortened drastically, and a mustache sprouted on her upper lip. Her delicate human feet had become hard hooves. She was now not a nymph but a faun. Physically; she would never be male in spirit.”

— Piers Anthony

45. “But one must go where one’s road leads, even when it’s a distressing road.”

— Piers Anthony

46. “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

47. “God created the earth but the Devil evolved it.”

— Piers Anthony

48. “All true art stems from the depths of the unconscious mind.”

— Piers Anthony

49. “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

50. “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