Robert Silverberg Quotes

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.

I'm interested in dismantling the distinction between masculine and feminine writing both because I think it's a false distinction and, I think, ultimately an insulting one. It's as insulting to men as it is to women. I'm not sure what masculine writing would look like - I assume some combination of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Writing can't be gendered in that way.

Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

I don't think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the 'Comedy Central Roasts' for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

A book is not an example of 'women's writing' simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become 'women's writing' when it could not have been written by a man.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors.

People thought I wrote in a very 'masculine' way.

When people ask me for secrets to writing, I say, 'Read to write.'

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.

It is much easier not to write like a man than to write like a woman.

Believe it or not, I don't collaborate with women, though my agent and editor are both females. For the most part, they do little editing on my characters.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

The question I hate the most is "How did you DO it - write novels and raise your children simultaneously!" I mean, do MALE authors get asked that??

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.

Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.