Top 48 Robert Sheckley Quotes
#1. I don't much like to look back with the idea that I was doing it wrong then or I'm doing it wrong now.
Robert Sheckley
#2. The British audience was very important to me. I have always looked away from American to non-American audiences and so this was important.
Robert Sheckley
#3. I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.
Robert Sheckley
#4. I sell well now in Russia. I remember one signing in Russia some years ago where the bookstore had two strongmen to hold the crowds back.
Robert Sheckley
#5. It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven't written about Oregon yet, although I've been there 20 years - possibly I'm almost due.
Robert Sheckley
#6. Here she was trying to teach him the Peasant Shuffle. He could not hope to master it all in a night, of course; at the Peasants' School in Zug they had spent an entire semester on Cringing alone.
Robert Sheckley
#7. Why in God's name should a God be praised if he is only performing his Godly function?
Robert Sheckley
#8. I knew I was doing something right because it was selling so I didn't want to interfere with it.
Robert Sheckley
#9. The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.
Robert Sheckley
#11. Number 402, your name is Will Barrent. Age 27, blood type O-L3, Index JX-221-R. Guilty of murder.
Robert Sheckley
#12. I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.
Robert Sheckley
#14. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called 'religion,' and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor.
Robert Sheckley
#16. I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.
Robert Sheckley
#17. As far as the mechanics go, working with other people on received ideas was for me a very interesting technical problem. I can't say that any of my collaborations engaged my heart, but they engaged the craftsman in me.
Robert Sheckley
#18. I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.
Robert Sheckley
#19. - "What is reality?"
- "One of the many possible illusions.
Robert Sheckley
#20. Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.
Robert Sheckley
#21. I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.
Robert Sheckley
#22. The ingenious way in which Dennison and his colleagues broke out of their seemingly impregnable prison, using only a steel belt buckle, a tungsten filament, three hens' eggs, and twelve chemicals that can be readily obtained from the human body, is too well known to be repeated here.
Robert Sheckley
#23. I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.
Robert Sheckley
#24. A lot of us don't want to be quite that serious about world problems. Our life is there to enjoy, not to be an eternal dissident, eternally unhappy with how things are and with the state of mankind.
Robert Sheckley
#25. I think it can be quite impossible to think well of yourself, so I prefer not to think about that too much. But I am very pleased, obviously.
Robert Sheckley
#26. The aim of intelligence is to put the whole goddamned human race out of work.
Robert Sheckley
#27. Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.
Robert Sheckley
#28. I would like to do a novel where some curse turns that into how the world really is - a blessing or a curse, I don't know which.
Robert Sheckley
#29. There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.
Robert Sheckley
#30. For love, as he knew it, was an aberration, a form of temporary insanity, a shortlived state of autosuggestion.
Love was a state which a wise man would prudently avoid.
Robert Sheckley
#31. He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable -- a routine miracle.
Robert Sheckley
#32. She was an extremely attractive woman if you liked the type, which could best be described as homicidal schizophrenic paranoiac with kittenish overtones.
Robert Sheckley
#33. Action isn't my forte. I'm an expert on contemplation and mild regret.
Robert Sheckley
#34. All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth of falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.
Robert Sheckley
#35. So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.
Robert Sheckley
#36. Once you find you can't walk as far and as fast as you were able, life becomes more complicated.
Robert Sheckley
#37. It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin.
Robert Sheckley
#38. I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.
Robert Sheckley
#39. An error which is not perpetuated cannot be viewed as any error at all.
Robert Sheckley
#40. I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.
Robert Sheckley
#41. A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.
Robert Sheckley
#42. The Shits played raucous music, which was danced to by immature virgins in middleless dresses.
Robert Sheckley
#43. I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.
Robert Sheckley
#44. Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.
Robert Sheckley
#45. But science perhaps is very difficult without faith. Also there is no simple way of saying now we have science, we don't need faith anymore.
Robert Sheckley
#46. I was forever reading outside of the field as well as in it.
Robert Sheckley
#47. I have simply given up a longevity which I never possessed anyhow. I have turned away from the con game which the gods run in their heavenly side-show. I no longer care under which shell the pea of immortality might be found. I don't need it. I have my moment which is quite enough.
Robert Sheckley
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