Robert Sheckley

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

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.

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.

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.

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 finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.

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.

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

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.

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

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

The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.

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'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.

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

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.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

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.

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.

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

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