Robert Silverberg quotes - page 4

She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood. (Robert Silverberg)
The fascination of what's difficult,” said Chalk. "It spins the world on its bearings. View quote
Robert Silverberg
I have come to prefer something looser, a rough sort of definition which says simply that science fiction attempts to portray that which does not exist, a speculative reality, but endeavors to explore the consequences of such a speculation in a rigorous, systematic, and scientifically plausible way. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Only a man who doubts his own bravery bristles when called a coward. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Like all bureaucrats, he was bewildered by an unpredictable development. View quote
Robert Silverberg
The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die. View quote
Robert Silverberg
A man who lies to himself is the worst liar of all. View quote
Robert Silverberg
I felt an unmanly pity for the beasts we slew, for I fear I don't really have the killer instinct. I don't have the starving instinct either, though, and so I fired away. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Take this as a bit of easy wisdom: people who try to rule over other people are going to be hated. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. "Junkie!” Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. "Economist! View quote
Robert Silverberg
A minnow huddled in the dark, waiting to trap the whales. (Robert Silverberg)
My style too reflects the man, for I know myself to be earnest, solemn, fond of courtly gestures, and given to communicating more perhaps than others realy want to know; al these traits I find in my own prose. It has its faults, yet am I pleased with it: I have my faults, yet am I pleased with me. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Back in the 1950's, at the outset of my career, I had allowed some early discouragements in the marketplace to turn me into a purveyor of mass-produced claptrap; I had written (and sold) untold reams of stuff with titles like "Guardians of the Crystal Gate” and "Thunder over Starhaven,” unreconstructed zap-zap pulp adventure fiction. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Research, he calls it. Research. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Rocannon's World is superior space opera, good vivid fun, short, briskly told, inventive and literate. View quote
Robert Silverberg
The process of changing your mind is a tricky one. You start at Position A, which you hold with stern stubbornness, resolving never to give it up. Then you start to question your original resolution. Is it wise to be so stubborn? Perhaps you should consider alternate ideas. You revise your original inflexibility a little, abandoning Position A and adopting Position B, which is very much like it in most ways, with only a few ifs and maybes added. Then, by a gradual series of compromises, private deals, and shifts of purpose, you slide spinelessly through the alphabet until you arrive at Position Z, the total opposite of your original point of view. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Evidently a lot of people were yelling "Flying saucer!” tonight, because the announcers were going to great pains to insist that it was nothing but a meteor. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Of course, Chalk had little need for further money. It had motivated him once, but not now. Nor did the acquisition of greater power please him much. Despite the customary theories, Chalk had attained sufficient power so that he was willing to stop expanding if only he could be sure of holding what he had. No, it was something else, something inner, that governed his decisions now. When the love of money and the love of power are both sated, the love of love remains. View quote
Robert Silverberg
What counts is what's happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that's a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God's will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn't have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there's only death, Death, whom we must reject. View quote
Robert Silverberg
There's no use trying to kid myself with cheery little uplifting cliches. I've been forced right up against the underlying truth of things. What a dark and cruel place the world is, for all its beauty, for all its wonder! We have miracles around us on every side-a spiderweb is a miracle, Lora!-but we also have violence, insanity, terrible disease, sudden death. The same Nature that brings us the mountains and the rivers and the green glistening meadows brings us the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood of red-hot lava rolling toward the city. (Robert Silverberg)