Robert Silverberg quotes:

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Ignorance can't be pardoned. Only cured.

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

Never pass by a chance to shut up.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.