Robert Silverberg
Prolific author best known for writing science fiction, a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
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.
He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.
Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.
Never pass by a chance to shut up.
I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.
My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.
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.
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.
“Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”
Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody’s thought it.
Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”
Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet.
Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.
I don't know, Mattison thinks. That’s cool. I don't know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it.
Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.
“Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct.”
She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.
Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.
It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty.