Robert Silverberg Quotes & Sayings

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting. — Robert Silverberg

Ignorance can't be pardoned. Only cured. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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

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

That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end they get so bad that we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are. — Robert Silverberg

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

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! — Robert Silverberg

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

Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it. — Robert Silverberg

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

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 — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion. — Robert Silverberg

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

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

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

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

To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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 ... — Robert Silverberg

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

There are our ghosts,' Smithers said.
It was a word he liked to use, said Brewster. Like most of us Brewster had read a few ghost stories, and to him the word 'ghosts' summoned up the creaking floorboards of a haunted house, shrouded white figures gliding silently through darkness, fluttering robes moving of their own bodiless accord, strangely transparent coaches travelling swiftly down a midnight road, and other such images quite remote from the chanting and drumming of desert folk in gaudy garb, with jingling anklets and necklaces, under a hot fierce sun. But the sounds of the Thar came from some invisible source, and to Smithers they were sounds made by ghosts.
("Smithers And The Ghosts Of The Thar") — Robert Silverberg

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

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. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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

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

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. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

I'm up at 5:30 or 6, but not willingly. By 8:30, I'm in my home office. I take a swim in the afternoon, and I garden. We have about an acre of land. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

History could be as arbitrary as poetry, he told himself: what is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one? The act of selecting facts, by definition, inherently involved discarding facts as well, often the ones most inconvenient to the pattern that the historian was trying to reveal. Truth thus became an abstract concept: three different historians, working with the same set of data, might easily come up with three different "truths." Whereas myth digs deep into the fundamental reality of the spirit, into that infinite well that is the shared consciousness of the entire race, reaching the levels where truth is not an optional matter, but the inescapable foundation of all else. In that sense myth could be truer than history. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

We are born by accident into a purely random universe. — Robert Silverberg

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? — Robert Silverberg

You're not too tall," Dunk blurted out. "You're just right for ... " He realized what he had been about to say, and blushed furiously. "For?" said Tanselle, cocking her head inquisitively. "Puppets," he finished lamely. — Robert Silverberg

Never pass by a chance to shut up. — Robert Silverberg

Basil Donovan was drunk again. — Robert Silverberg

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I'll keep that in mind. I'll be of good cheer. — Robert Silverberg

Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust. — Robert Silverberg

He felt disgruntled and obscurely let down at having paid good money to discover that the vision that had so irradiated his consciousness was a second-hand one. On the other hand, he told himself, probably it was better to hear that a phantom memory had come floating up out of some lecture of his student days than to be informed that he was going out of his mind. — Robert Silverberg

It was as though our invaders had passed the word through the galaxies: SEE OLD EARTH NOW UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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.' — Robert Silverberg

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

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

A few years ago, I actually did come up with a mocking sort of epitaph for myself. It's this: 'Here lies Robert Silverberg. He spent most of his life in the future. Now he's in the past.' — Robert Silverberg

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present. — Robert Silverberg

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

It was the same in just about every trade. Sooner or later someone decided it needed organizing, and the one thing you could be sure of was that the organizers weren't going to be the people who, by general acknowledgment, were at the top of their craft. They were working too hard. To be fair, it generally wasn't done by the worst, neither. They were working hard, too. They had to. — Robert Silverberg

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

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. — Robert Silverberg

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? — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg

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

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. — Robert Silverberg

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

And so," Kelly said, "you godlike ones show your godlike natures by feeling superior to the artificial humans you create. Even though androids outlive you and outperform you in most ways." "We feel superior to you and inferior at the same time, Kelly. And that's why most of us dislike and distrust you." She pondered that. "How intricate you naturals can be! Why must you be so concerned about superiority and inferiority? Why not simply accept all distinctions and concentrate on matters of real importance? — Robert Silverberg

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? — Robert Silverberg

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. — Robert Silverberg