Best 30 quotes of Robert Silverberg on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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?

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

I tried to be good to Judith, I tried to be kind and loving, but our hatred kept coming between us.

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!

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.

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.

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

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")

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

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.