Best 31 quotes of Glen Cook on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? 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 patronising wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.

- Goblin, that was a dumb stunt. - It sure was. Made me feel forty years younger.

I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.

One endured with humble dignity the consequences of youthful folly.

One's own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down.

She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.

The only exercise I get is jumping to conclusions.

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." [The Instrumentalities of the Night: An Interview with Glen Cook, The SF Site, September 2005]