Michael Moorcock

Did God truly build and populate a small planet for His own purposes; perhaps merely to relieve His boredom?

If you were to believe all the old, degenerate German legends, there’s a Grail in every castle, a Charlemagne or an Arthur under every mound! There not a noble house without at least one werewolf offspring or a younger son who’s made a pact with the Devil, an uncle practising the profane arts of alchemy, a vampirical grandfather, a mad monk, a ruined abbey in the grounds where witches meet, an incarcerated lunatic (or heiress—or both), an infanticide or two (and a patricide), and, of course, a family ghost.

My instinct shouted “Conspiracy” but my head reasoned “Coincidence”.

I guessed he experienced the terrible confusion of a true solipsist when the outer world impinges.

Thus woman trusts in man down all the years and so, as always, is betrayed.

In other words, the listener’s own picture was painted in the shining coulours St Odhran provided. By seeing what they wished, they also saw what he wished them to see. “They are the Orchestra,” he had told me earlier, “and I am merely the Conductor.”

Redefine the terms by which Man views the world, and thus eventually you redefine the world itself.

Destiny was apparently a word describing an individual’s desperate need for certainty.

My own self-deception at least promised some kind of pleasure. Theirs offered nothing but terror and guilt.

You are martyred, as woman is ever martyred, particularly if she seeks her own power.

“It’s never ‘should’ with engineers, my old friend, but ‘how’? Have you not learned that much?”

Here the idea of God has been replaced by the idea of the Future. The two notions are, admittedly, all but identical in the way in which they are self-contradictory and thus always fundamentally confusing to their worshippers, who must look to priests for translation, and so inevitably the priests (or whatever they call them) gradually take power...