Quotes from John Sladek

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.

This is mainly because I spend a lot of time writing and so don't have much time to read; I hate to waste that time reading what may turn out to be junk food for the mind, when there's so much real writing to be read.

SF has at least the advantage of not depending on preconceptions.

Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.

The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate.

I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.

As the semantic engineer, your job is naming the parts and tightening nuts and bolts. I suggest you get back to your office and do that - right now!

Laugh if you will... They laughed at all great ideas and inventions. They laughed at nitrous oxide.

R-4 got stuck on the First Law. "Can anyone really protect a human being from all harm whatever?" it thought. "No. It is inevitable that all humans must be injured, contract illnesses and ultimately die. The future can only be averted for humans who are already dead. Ergo ..." It took a dozen cops to subdue R-4, after his blood orgy in a department store (83 dead, none injured).

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.

Yeah but Father, is that what you meant by God being a paradox? How he was so pleased to get a chance to nail his Son there that he even gave up his plan to fry the whole world in Hell?

History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken

Music is the music of all music, and I am jealous.

But then a counter-sect arose, embracing persons who thought they believed in Darwin's novel theory. What they actually believed in was Reformed Darwinism, a religious and social theory combining 'survival of the fittest' with 'Devil take the hindmost'. The important thing was to be a survivor. Take care of your tribe and your territory. Be selfish. God helps those who help themselves.

I usually like whatever I've recently finished best.

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

Whatever I'm reading at the moment seems to influence whatever I'm writing.

To my mind, the best SF addresses itself to problems of the here and now, or even to problems which have never been solved and never will be solved - I'm thinking of Philip K. Dick's work here, dealing with questions of reality, for example.

I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.