“I suppose that every blundering idealist who hasn’t been brought face to face with the hard facts of life carries, at the back of his mind, a sneaking suspicion that villainy is a very dashing and romantic thing. When your mind turned turtle, or when they turned it for you, your new personality was necessarily fabricated out of all your fragmentary romantic notions of villainy—unlimited ambition and conceit, absolute lack of emotion, and all the rest of the supervillain ideology!”

—  Fritz Leiber, book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 14 (p. 144)

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Fritz Leiber67
American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction 1910–1992

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