20 Quotes by Robert Sheckley
- I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.
- I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.
- I was forever reading outside of the field as well as in it.
- I knew I was doing something right because it was selling so I didn't want to interfere with it.
- I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.
- The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.
- I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.
- Science fiction is very healthy in its form.
- I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.
- It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven't written about Oregon yet, although I've been there 20 years - possibly I'm almost due.
- I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.
- I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.
- So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.
- I don't much like to look back with the idea that I was doing it wrong then or I'm doing it wrong now.
- I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.
- I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.
- Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.
- There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.
- As far as the mechanics go, working with other people on received ideas was for me a very interesting technical problem. I can't say that any of my collaborations engaged my heart, but they engaged the craftsman in me.
- A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.
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