Glen Cook Quotes

Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.

The man who counts on the aid of a god deserves the help he doesn't get.

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of "somedays." Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English.

Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.

There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.

There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.

Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.

No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.

I'm an incurable romantic. The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

My favorite sport is female and my favorite food is beer.

I can laugh at peasants and townies chained all their lives to a tiny corner of the earth while I roam its face and see its wonders, but when I go down, there will be no child to carry my name, no family to mourn me save my comrades, no one to remember, no one to raise a marker over my cold bit of ground.

Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.

I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.

Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.

The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.

Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete.

Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.

If one chooses sides on emotion then the rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honour, freedom, independance, truth, the right.......all the subjective illusions. All the eternal trigger words. We are minions of the villan of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance.

I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.

Time will unfold its leaves.

Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.

Consistency is the sign of a narrow mind.

I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled towards absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world. And that opinion becomes more important than all our sneaky, sleazy schemes of greed, lust, self-aggrandizement, whatever we are up to while lying the world into believing we are just plain nice folks.

A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse.

More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.

Any man who barely sustains an armistice with himself has no business poking around in an alien soul.

The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing.

Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational.

I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.

. . .and the thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.

Where there is no waste, there is no want.