Spider Robinson Quotes

Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain.

It's a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help, and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more.

Doc Webster's eyes rolled briefly, like loaded dice, and came up snake eyes.

If you’re under 35, and not passionately interested in health food, this one may go over your head. If so, count your blessings: Until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected beneath Greenwich village. To some extent it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village sewers only on Christmas Day. Even so, one might have thought they could hardly help but cause talk, since they tended when awake to be enormous, ferocious, carnivorous, and extremely hungry. Yet in Greenwich Village of all places on Earth they went unnoticed until last year, when they were finally destroyed. Everyone knows that Yule Gibbons ate only nuts and fruits…

Am I finally addressing a sentient being?

You can show a dozen guys murderin' each other on TV but you can't ever show two people making love. A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman.

She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all.

Certainly, all of us at Callahan's were heir to the tradition of the B-movie — and the A-movie for that matter — that any female who enters your life in a dramatic manner must be your fated love.

Книги се пишат по най-шашави причини. Някои са написани, за да изплатят ипотека, други — за да спасят света, а трети — просто от нямане какво да се прави. Един от любимите ми анекдоти е за писателя, дето се хванал на бас, че е буквално невъзможно да се напише толкова КОФТИ книга, та да не се намери кой да я издаде. И какво станало по-нататък — писателят взел, че написал най-тъпия и най-шаблонния роман, на който бил способен… И не само успял да го продаде, ами и публиката настояла за над две дузини продължения (Не мога да викажа името на писателя: току-виж наследниците му ме осъдили, а пък не разполагам с документи. Поразпитайте на всяко събиране на фантасти — този анекдот е доста известен.)

I was a little afraid you might get all macho about not exposing your wife to danger.
I am. I wouldn't want you to accidentally suffer any harm while beating the shit out of me for trying to keep you out of the party. You could forget and hit me on the head, and hurt your knuckles.

How did they manage to make 'you reap what you sow' such a trite-sounding cliche that I'm only just now realizing that I can never get away with anything, and never have? For what twisted reason were I and all my generation told so often of the essential corruption and evil of Man that it took me twenty years to learn to like myself and another ten to begin to love myself?

Over and over again I find in my short stories that I am, by policy, optimistic. Looking back on it and thinking it over after 25 years, I'm real proud of that. If that's a defect, it's a defect I'm sinfully proud of and I hope I can manage to maintain that excessively optimistic attitude for another 25 years.

The only kind of church I'd want to belong to is the one where no one can quite remember who the hell the prophet was or what exactly it was he did and they wouldn't recognize him if he showed up.

God is an iron… and that's a hot one.

Now I can say that I have sampled the spectrum of the pleasure system at both ends — none and all there is — and I think the rest of my life I will dedicate myself to the middle of the road and see how that works out. Starting with the very weak tea and toast I'm going to ask you to bring me in another ten minutes or so. With maltose. But as for this other stuff, this joy thing, that I would like to begin learning about, as much as I can. I don't really know a God damned thing about it, but I understand it has something to do with sharing and caring and what did you say your name was?