Robert Silverberg Quotes

Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.

The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations. (Dark City Lights)

In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write.

To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can't be done subtly or delicately.

When I was 14, I thought, 'How wonderful to be a science fiction writer. I'd like to do that.' I have never lost touch with that ambitious 14-year-old, and I can't help chuckling and thinking, 'You did it, and you did it right.'

Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.

The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.

It's a cultural matter. They take pride in their unpride. It reflects their lack of status. Bottom ... of the bottom of the human world, and they know it, and they don't like it, and the squalor is like a badge of nonstatus for them. Saying, you want us to be filth, we'll live in filth too. Reveling in it. Wallowing in it. If we're not people, we don't have to be tidy ...

Part of the prejudice thing is that the victim has to be somebody weaker than you in numbers, but somebody you secretly admire or fear.

Ignorance can't be pardoned. Only cured.

There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.

I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.

Who could not return from a visit to Jack Vance's world, without feeling that he had been somewhere unique, that he had experienced things unavailable in our mundane world?

Back in my pulp-mag days, I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5,000-7,500 words in a single day.

I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED by Robert J. Sawyer I've spent a lot of time watching Earth - more than forty of that planet's years. My arrival was in response to the signal from our automated probe, which had detected that the paper-skinned bipedal beings of that world had split the atom. The probe had served well, but there were some things only a living being could do properly, and assessing whether a lifeform should be contacted by the Planetary Commonwealth was one.

I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Any sinner can find redemption if the yield of his sin is spectacular enough. Our

When you know that something is dying inside you, you learn not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment.

As youngest boy in service, the worst jobs fell to him, and this would

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

The physical distress was over, but something else still remained, some sort of free-floating disquiet, at first hard to comprehend, but which he came quickly to understand for what it was: the splendor of the tunnels had kindled in him at first a sense of admiration verging on awe, but that had gone moving swiftly onward through his soul to become a crushing, devastating sensation of personal inadequacy.

Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.

If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock.

Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.

He was looking for a vehicle of purpose, for a vessel to contain his formless ambitions and abilities.

I don't think I can even imagine what a culture that's been developing steadily for a billion years ought to be like. Disembodied electrical essences, maybe. Ghostly creatures flitting in and out of the eighth, ninth, and tenth dimensions. Cosmic minds that know all, perceive all, understand all. Maybe

[He] had riposted with the proper metaphysical statements, yet he was disturbed.

Earth fell," said the Surgeon, "because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.

One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.

On the contrary, Mr. Wiggin. The tax laws are designed to trick people into paying more than they have to. That way the rich who are in the know get to take advantage of drastic tax breaks, while those who don't have such good connections and haven't yet found an accountant who does are tricked into paying ludicrously higher amounts. I, however, know all the tricks.

He met me at the airport; it was ten in the morning, Washington time, when I arrived, after having taken a plane that left Los Angeles International at 10:10 A.M. Los Angeles time. Who says time-reversal is hard to accomplish?

Meanwhile here I am- Earthborn woman, a mere barbaric maula, geting deeper into Imperial Space with each passing light second. I should be trembling with fear, I suppouse.
No. Let the Emperor tremble. Laylah is here!

Many people could say things in a cutting way, Nanny knew. But Granny Weatherwax could listen in a cutting way. She could make something sound stupid just by hearing it.

There are other themes for poetry besides immersion in the Will, my friends. The love of person for person, the joy of defending one's home, the wonder of standing naked beneath the fiery stars - " The invader laughed. "Can it be that Earth fell so swiftly because its only poets were poets of acquiescence to destiny?

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

In every man's life there is something he feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul so long as it remains undone, and yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps to fulfill the obsession will bring him more pain than pleasure.

Basil Donovan was drunk again.

Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead.

I'm an urban New Yorker to the last molecule.

He was only now outgrowing his playboy phase, groping his way out of frivolity the way others might grope their way out of atheism.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

My temperament is not inclined toward more self-promotion than is absolutely necessary for my professional well-being.

When you enslave a black man, you enslave yourself as well, for now you are bound to him as surely as he is bound to you, and your character is shaped by his bondage as surely as his own is. Make the black man servile, and in the same process you make yourself tyrannical. Make the black man quiver in fear before you, and you make yourself a monster of terror.

She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible.