Roger Zelazny

"But I believe it was the Rilke who said that life is a game we must begin playing before we have learned the rules. Do we ever? Are there really rules? Perhaps I read too many poets."

"We revisit the mental landscape of childhood in times of trouble."

"But I remember that Ernest Hemingway told Bernard Berenson that the secret of his greatest book was that there was no symbolism. The sea was the sea, the old man an old man, the boy a boy, the marlin a marlin, and the sharks the same as other sharks. People empower these things themselves, groping beneath the surface, always looking for more."

"There is a part of me which likes to see things through allusions and touched with mystery. And the American part never trusts anything and is always looking for the real story behind the front one."

"Mirror, mirror, why does the real world so seldom cooperate with our aesthetic enthusiasms?"

"“And what is imagination?” “A thing born of feeling and reason.”"

"I wonder what Hokusai would have done in contemporary times? He is silent on the matter."

"According to John Pfeiffer, author of The Human Brain, “There is an entire universe packed inside your skull, a compact model of your surroundings based on all the experiences you have accumulated during the course of a lifetime. Of necessity such a model is limited by the range of one’s perceptions and the nature of one’s experiences. Thus, the world about which I write, the world to which I hold up my distorting mirror, is not the real world in any ultimate sense. It is only my limited, personal image of the real world."