Robert Sheckley

“‘Shall we go down and have a closer look?’ Hum asked.“ ‘All right. I think we have time — wait! What day is this?’“Hum calculated silently, then said, ‘The fifth day of Luggat.’“ ‘Damn,’ Cordovir said. ‘I have to go home and kill my wife.’“ ‘It’s a few hours before sunset,’ Hum said. ‘I think you have time to do both.’“Cordovir wasn’t sure. ‘I’d hate to be late.’“ ‘Well then. You know how fast I am,’ Hum said. ‘If it gets late, I’ll hurry back and kill her myself. How about that?’“ ‘That’s very decent of you.’ Cordovir thanked the younger man and together they slithered down the steep mountainside.”

“I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.”

“Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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'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.”

“A lot of us don't want to be quite that serious about world problems. Our life is there to enjoy, not to be an eternal dissident, eternally unhappy with how things are and with the state of mankind.”

“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.”

“A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.”

“I knew I was doing something right because it was selling so I didn't want to interfere with it.”

“Action isn’t my forte. I’m an expert on contemplation and mild regret.”

“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.”

“He created waterfalls for her out of the morning dew, and from the colored pebbles of a meadow stream he made a necklace more beautiful than emeralds, sadder than pearls. She caught him in her net of silken hair, she carried him down, down, into deep and silent waters, past obliteration. He showed her frozen stars and molten sun; she gave him long, entwined shadows and the sound of black velvet. He reached out to her and touched moss, grass, ancient trees, iridescent rocks; her fingertips, striving upwards, brushed old planets and silver moonlight, the flash of comets and the cry of dissolving suns.”

“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.”

“Once you find you can't walk as far and as fast as you were able, life becomes more complicated.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”