ROBERT SILVERBERG

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.'

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.'

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Never pass by a chance to shut up.

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.