A Quote by Robert Silverberg

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.
My secret world had been invaded, and the attractive figure of Tiptree - he did strike several people as attractive - was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia.
Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.
One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.
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.
I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.
From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.
We need more female directors, we also need men to step up and identify with female characters and stories about women. We don't want to create a ghetto where women have to do movies about women. To assume stories about women need to be told by a woman isn't necessarily true, just as stories about men don't need a male director.
It has been said, "History is written by the victors." I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history.
You've got to support male stories and healthy male relationships and things. You can't just be a woman that is only want to support female stories or a guy that's only wanting to support guy stories. It needs to all mix again.
I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.
Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.
I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.
I'm totally in love with Jane Austen and have always been in love with Jane Austen. I did my dissertation at university on black people in eighteenth-century Britain - so I'd love to do a Jane Austen-esque film but with black people.
I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.
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