Top 50 Robert Silverberg Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Any sinner can find redemption if the yield of his sin is spectacular enough. Our
Robert Silverberg
#3. Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.
Robert Silverberg
#4. [He] had riposted with the proper metaphysical statements, yet he was disturbed.
Robert Silverberg
#5. Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.
Robert Silverberg
#6. 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
#7. Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.
Robert Silverberg
#8. Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.
Robert Silverberg
#9. I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.
Robert Silverberg
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. It was as though our invaders had passed the word through the galaxies: SEE OLD EARTH NOW UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.
Robert Silverberg
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#27. Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.
Robert Silverberg
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.
Robert Silverberg
#32. 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
#33. Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust.
Robert Silverberg
#34. I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?
Robert Silverberg
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can't be done subtly or delicately.
Robert Silverberg
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.
Robert Silverberg
#44. My temperament is not inclined toward more self-promotion than is absolutely necessary for my professional well-being.
Robert Silverberg
#45. Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I'll keep that in mind. I'll be of good cheer.
Robert Silverberg
#46. Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.
Robert Silverberg
#47. Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead.
Robert Silverberg
#48. 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
#49. He was looking for a vehicle of purpose, for a vessel to contain his formless ambitions and abilities.
Robert Silverberg
#50. As youngest boy in service, the worst jobs fell to him, and this would
Robert Silverberg
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