Michael Moorcock

Michael: (on Tolkien) What I found lacking in Tolkien which I had found in, for instance, the Elder Edda, was a sense of tragedy, of reality, of mankind's impermanence. Tolkien really did set out to write a fairy tale and in my view that's exactly what he did, provide a perfect escape plan, which had the added attractions of having been written by an Oxford don. I knew and liked Tolkien who in a bufferish sort of way was very kind to me and encouraging. I looked forward to those books coming out. I was deeply disappointed by their lack of weight and their lack of ambitious language. They are about as likely to last as "the book of the century" as Ouida, Hall Caine or Marie Corelli, all of whom were judged the greatest writers of their day by a contemporary audience. Thomas Hardy hardly got a mention and well into the twenties people were still wondering if George Eliot was going to last. You can just hope nobody puts a curse like that on your own work! Tolkien has the right elements of snobbery and escapism to make it a huge success. John Buchan for teenagers. A compendium of disguised bigotry and English high church snobbery. I hate it for exactly those qualities which made it so popular. It's a lullaby. Not sure we need lullabies at the moment. Unless we're all just going to give up, go to sleep and wake up dead. I really do feel contempt for Tolkien and a certain disgust for those adults who voted him writer of the century. This has nothing to do with why I decided to be a writer.

Michael (when asked if he has a less less chaotic side to him) I've brought up three kids, aAnd I think I did it fairly responsibly. But I suppose I was indulging Chaos and Law in my life at the same time really. One day I'd be climbing out of my car onto the roof while it was going along the road, cause I felt like a breath of air (I wasn't driving by the way!); next day, I'd be making sure I got the kids to school. There's never been much division between the two sides of me. I just decided when I was very young, that I was not going to let the world frighten me into a corner. And yet at the same time I had the perfectly ordinary desire to live a perfectly ordinary life. I think there's a lot to be said for that normal life, but personally, I've never lived a particularly cautious life. It's not possible, I'd get bored to quickly. Yet at the same time I think I've lived a fairly sensible life, when required. I haven't been perfect by any means, I've been pretty imperfect really, but I've done my best. I've always managed to pay my mortgage and that sort of thing while living a financially reckless life. But if you've got a facility, as I have, for writing pretty fast, you can usually catch up on yourself if things start to go very bad. I'm just not a person who's going to avoid experience, but at the same time, I don't want anyone to get harmed by me making those sort of explorations. All through my fantasy novels you've got the constant searching for equilibrium until the Eternal Champion becomes fundamentally a champion not for Law or Chaos, but a champion of Equilibrium, of both. That's something that has developed as my own ordinary human wisdom has developed.

Michael: (on his childhood) I was playing guitar in a whorehouse at the age of 15 not because I was that good on the guitar or that sexy, but because I got on well with the girls and they liked me. I was a sort of mascot. Sex, drugs and rock and roll have, as it were, never been something I had to yearn for. I had probably enjoyed most of life's sweetest pleasures for quite a lot of the time by the age of 22 when I got married and settled down. I have been invited in to the English Literature world, too, but haven't been very comfortable in their churches.