15 Quotes by R.A. Lafferty

I finally saw the whole conspiracy standing as plain as an elephant in the street; also the conspiracy was admitted to me in great detail by one of the princes of the conspiracy." "Bad, Smith, very bad." "If one of the inmates should come to you right now, Doctor, and tell you it was raining outside, you'd say 'Bad, very bad', and make damning marks on his record." " That's probably true. It's an automatic response with me.

The opposite of liberal is stingy. The opposite of radical is superficial. The opposite of conservative is destructive. So I declare that I am a radical conservative liberal. Beware of men who use words to mean their opposites.

The ghost of some other fiction might say in truth to Science Fiction: “You're not very good, are you?” But Science Fiction can answer “Maybe not, but I'm alive and you're dead.

The Children's programs generally sounded interesting, such as ‘How to Be a Werewolf’. Well, how do you be a werewolf? Except that I am no longer a child, I would have attended this program and learned how to be a werewolf, and I would be one now.

Science Fiction is a collection of guerrilla bands each challenging the rights of the others to belong to the centrality. The band most challenged by the others is ‘high fantasy’, sometimes called ‘Sword and Sorcery’. There is a lot of stylized sneering at ‘S and S’.

The seven bad-humored and unfunny devils who eat ourselves and our narratives alive are Pretentiousness, Pomposity, Presumption, Pontificality, Pavoninity or Peacockery, Pornography, and Pride, these seven offenses to all life. They have oozed out from under the iron doors and then they have inflated themselves immeasurably.

The art of story-telling has not been declining from the beginning. It has been declining for only about twelve thousand years. One reason for the decline is a dietary deficiency: the scarcity of Wooly Rhinoceros Meat and of Dire Wolf Meat. And the other reason is the disappearance of good places where good stories may be told.

Christopher couldn't recall what day it was; he certainly didn't know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.

Foreman, you’re the historian,” Thomas said. “It’s tha same damned thing they killed me for the first time, isn’t it?” “Same damned thing, Thomas.