"The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change."
— Samuel R. Delany (Empire Star)

"It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind."
— Samuel R. Delany (Equinox)

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose."
— James Ellroy

"It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one."
— James Ellroy

"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception."
— James Ellroy

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."
— Raymond Chandler

"'there is no bad whiskey, there are only some whiskies that aren't as good as others'"
— Raymond Chandler

"As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books."
— Raymond Chandler

"You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me."
— Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest)

"I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon. (Kasper Gutman)"
— Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon)

"Time is the enemy of identity"
— Michael Moorcock

"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

"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

"For you see, the headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse."
— Roger Zelazny

"Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon."
— Roger Zelazny

"The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles."
— Harlan Ellison

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
— Harlan Ellison

"Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver."
— Harlan Ellison

"We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

"
— Isabelle Eberhardt

"The cowardly belief that a person must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness. There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the non-existent horizon, and her empire is an intangible one, for her domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit."
— Isabelle Eberhardt

""Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.""
— Paul Bowles

"Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life....we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet is all seems limitless."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above."
— Paul Bowles

"Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. "
— William S. Burroughs

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
— William S. Burroughs

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on."
— William S. Burroughs

"As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle."
— William S. Burroughs (The Adding Machine: Selected Essays)

"Somewhere nere Ogallala, about six hours into that majestic, maddening prairie, I realize that half an hour has passed since I've seen a vehicle in either direction.
Oh, I think, as I finally see a pair of headlights draw nigh in the eastbound lane, so this must be where the West begins."
— Lily Burana (Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America)

"Never do anything yourself that others can do for you."
— Agatha Christie

"It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. "
— Agatha Christie

"Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom. "
— Pat Califia

"How massively the mountains stand, while low to the ground the sand blows. The sand blows on and on. And then there are no mountains, none at all, the sand has kissed and whispered them away. And still, the sand blows on."
— Tanith Lee (Delirium's Mistress: A Novel of the Flat Earth)

"Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root."
— Tanith Lee (Delirium's Mistress: A Novel of the Flat Earth)

"I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider."
— Colin Wilson

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA -- ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State."
— Heinrich Himmler

"The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
— G.K. Chesterton

"When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?"
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor. "
— Charles Willeford

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."
— Agatha Christie

"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one."
— Agatha Christie

"If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off."
— Agatha Christie

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
— Anaïs Nin

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
— Mark Twain

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
— George Orwell

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
— Orson Welles

"Live to the point of tears."
— Albert Camus

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
— Albert Camus