Robert Silverberg Quotes

“We are not accustomed to threats here,” Lorivade declared.
“I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences.”

He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for...although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.

He named the names of gods. He named the names of kings—the secret names, the names they had worn as princes, before they became the newest Harinamur. He called upon all the forces of the universe to free himself from—
Me.

The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.

Like all bureaucrats, he was bewildered by an unpredictable development.

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.

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

He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people.

Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.

Now, you know I’m no bigot, Lorie. I don’t care how many eyes, tentacles, eating orifices, or antennae an organism happens to have, so long as it knows its stuff. What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance.

It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself.

Take this as a bit of easy wisdom: people who try to rule over other people are going to be hated.

“You speak very generally,” Valentine said.
“I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly.

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.

The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die.