Top 40 Robert Sheckley Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called ‘religion,’ and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor.”

— Robert Sheckley

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

— Robert Sheckley

3. “I think it can be quite impossible to think well of yourself, so I prefer not to think about that too much. But I am very pleased, obviously.”

— Robert Sheckley

4. “But science perhaps is very difficult without faith. Also there is no simple way of saying now we have science, we don’t need faith anymore.”

— Robert Sheckley

5. “Science fiction is very healthy in its form.”

— Robert Sheckley

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

— Robert Sheckley

7. “What was I supposed to do? Was I meant to be nothing but God? I had tried the God business and found it too limited. It was a job for a simple-minded egomaniac. There had to be something else for me to do – something more meaningful, more expressive of my true self. I am convinced of it! That is my problem, and that is the question I ask of you: What am I to do with myself?”

— Robert Sheckley

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

— Robert Sheckley

9. “Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.”

— Robert Sheckley

10. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

11. “When you have a project, do it exactly as you see fit; then fit the facts around the event, not the other way around.”

— Robert Sheckley

12. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

13. “All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth of falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.”

— Robert Sheckley

14. “Why in God’s name should a God be praised if he is only performing his Godly function?”

— Robert Sheckley

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

— Robert Sheckley

16. “The ingenious way in which Dennison and his colleagues broke out of their seemingly impregnable prison, using only a steel belt buckle, a tungsten filament, three hens’ eggs, and twelve chemicals that can be readily obtained from the human body, is too well known to be repeated here.”

— Robert Sheckley

17. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

18. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

19. “He learned. The machines taught on deep, unconscious levels. The machines intertwined their lessons with the basic drives, weaving a pattern of learned behavior with the life instinct. They taught, then blocked off conscious knowledge of the lessons, sealed it – and fused it. What had he been taught? For the social good, you must be your own policeman and witness. You must assume responsibility for any crime which might conceivably be yours.”

— Robert Sheckley

20. “Overhead, a Hawk was zeroing in on a watchbird. The armored murder machine had learned a lot in a few days. Its sole function was to kill. At present it was impelled toward a certain type of living organism, metallic like itself. But the Hawk had just discovered that there were other types of living organisms, too – Which had to be murdered.”

— Robert Sheckley

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

— Robert Sheckley

22. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

23. “I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.”

— Robert Sheckley

24. “A great majority of Terrans were idealists, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy, and the like. And not only did they believe, they also let those noble concepts guide their actions – except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable. When that happened, they acted expediently, but continued to talk moralistically. This meant that they were “hypocrites” – a term which every race has its counterpart of.”

— Robert Sheckley

25. “I sell well now in Russia. I remember one signing in Russia some years ago where the bookstore had two strongmen to hold the crowds back.”

— Robert Sheckley

26. “Love and war,” he said, “are Earth’s two staple commodities. We’ve been turning them both out in bumper crops since the beginning of time.”

— Robert Sheckley

27. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

28. “I would like to do a novel where some curse turns that into how the world really is – a blessing or a curse, I don’t know which.”

— Robert Sheckley

29. “The aim of intelligence is to put the whole goddamned human race out of work.”

— Robert Sheckley

30. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

31. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

32. “Here she was trying to teach him the Peasant Shuffle. He could not hope to master it all in a night, of course; at the Peasants’ School in Zug they had spent an entire semester on Cringing alone.”

— Robert Sheckley

33. “The absurdist stuff wasn’t terribly popular at the time I was doing it.”

— Robert Sheckley

34. “He shared the common human hallmark: he was simultaneously predictable and unfathomable – a routine miracle.”

— Robert Sheckley

35. “Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.”

— Robert Sheckley

36. “I don’t finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.”

— Robert Sheckley

37. “It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin.”

— Robert Sheckley

38. “Most men lead lives of quiet aspiration.”

— Robert Sheckley

39. “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.”

— Robert Sheckley

40. “An error which is not perpetuated cannot be viewed as any error at all.”

— Robert Sheckley

41. “These two races hunted each other, lived and died for each other, and, through ignorance or guile, ignored any relationship between each other. The relationship was utterly symbiotic, but completely unacknowledged by either race. In fact, each race pretended that it alone was a Civilized Intelligence, and that the other was bestial, contemptible, and of no account. And it now occured to both of themthat they were, in equal measure, participants in the general concept of Humanity.”

— Robert Sheckley

42. “Dramocles got up from the operating table thinking he had just had a massage, and now wanted to take a brisk walk. A posthypnotic command took him a hundred yards from Fish’s laboratory. Then he heard the explosion. Hurrying back, he saw that Dr. Fish had been blown up. Dramocles couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to blow up an inoffensive android like Fish. He never considered the possibility that he had done it himself, since exploded androids tell no tales.”

— Robert Sheckley

43. “The British audience was very important to me. I have always looked away from American to non-American audiences and so this was important.”

— Robert Sheckley

44. “I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.”

— Robert Sheckley

45. “I could probably sit here in my office and do nothing, and the criminal would find his way to me. That’s how strong the probabilities are in my favor.”

— Robert Sheckley

46. “If justice really existed, there would be no need for law.”

— Robert Sheckley