In this post, you will find great Fiction Quotes from famous people, such as George Takei, Vladimir Nabokov, Karen Thompson Walker, Judith Krantz, James Wolcott. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
We are living in a science fiction world.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the president, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that’s not the kind of fiction that I like to read.
Starring in a science-fiction film doesn’t mean you have to act science fiction.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what’s going to happen.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It’s an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.
I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it’s a nice way to neutralize that polarization.
My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
And then I met Jerry and he’s such a creative fiction writer, and I don’t know if there’s ever been a team put together the way we are – where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.
Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.
I love the fact that it’s not only about Star Trek, but about science fiction in general, and science.
I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that’s needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.
As a reader, I notice political views regardless of whether or not the book is fiction. What annoys me is when said views do nothing to advance the narrative.
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting.
My model for Kirk was Horatio Hornblower from the C.S. Forester sea stories. Shatner was open-minded about science fiction and a marvelous choice.
Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it’s still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.
The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is ‘write what you know,’ and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, ‘You can write about anything you can imagine.’
With science fiction there’s endless possibilities.
I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general – the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
Crime fiction is the new rock n’ roll.
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.
Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I’m creating a form of fiction.
Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.
Most of my work is science fiction, with many a spaceship but few cars.
To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.
Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It’s fiction’s business to ask them.
I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I’m not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
I’m always trying to make something that is impossible to film. Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel, you can get right inside somebody’s head.
I’m open to reading almost anything – fiction, nonfiction – as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.
It’s such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It’s hard for fiction to compete with that.
I’m mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
‘Star Wars’ is more fairy tale than true science fiction.
I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies.
I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‘Star Trek.’ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.
I rather like getting away from fiction.
The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.
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.
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn’t have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
I have a background writing screenplays and teleplays. I’ve tried to write prose and fiction but never really completed anything I thought worthy of publication or worthy of anyone else to even look at.
When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
I’ve always been a fan of science fiction films, and I’ve never been able to put my particular spin on it.
I was born in 1950 and watched science fiction and horror movies on TV and was always really fascinated by them.
I quite enjoy science fiction.
Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction.
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
‘Farscape’ is not what you call hard science fiction.
I’ve always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.
Epic science fiction game, that’s always been on my mind. Post-apocalyptic, ‘Fallout,’ was our first choice. Sci-fi was our second at the time, when we got the ‘Fallout’ license. We were going to do our own post-apocalyptic universe if we didn’t get ‘Fallout.’
I don’t like to read fiction. I like to learn something when I’m reading.
Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.
In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.
It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
The fact that it’s science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
But I don’t read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.
The thing about science fiction is that it’s totally wide open. But it’s wide open in a conditional way.
I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it’s the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.
I have no idea what my draw is for science fiction. I hope they come to me because they like complicated women. But I’ve never played the Bionic Woman. In ‘Sarah Connor’ and ‘Lost,’ I am not the orchestrator of what happens. I’ve played quite peripheral people.
Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.
To think that the heritage of the West, including post-war liberalism, was a selfish, secular, practical arrangement of politics is a fiction.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
Science fiction is something I never understood.
So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That’s why I don’t mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.
There’s a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be ‘good’, to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.
Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 – confusion even. And I think that’s hard to capture in journalism.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
First of all, writing at best – certainly fiction writing – more and more I think is magic.
I hardly read fiction; I mostly read nonfiction. I like to examine material things.
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.
I’ve read only fiction, so I don’t know anything actual.
I think if I’m going to do a science fiction, I’m going to go down a new path that I want to do.
Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.
I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we’re in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.
For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors – which is the logic of narratives in general – over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
With ‘Nobody Knows,’ I consciously set out to make a fiction film, which is a different approach from ‘Distance,’ but I still applied a lot of the things I learned from making ‘Distance’: for example, how to use the camera in relation to the children and how to create the right atmosphere on set.
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
I love science fiction.
The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama‘s view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it’s tennis without a net.
I love fiction and read novels constantly.
My books deliberately provide no answers or messages. I’m drilled in the habit of objectivity and also aware that the steady drip of fiction has more power than facts to shape opinion, so I handle it with caution.
Songwriting is just like any other kind of writing – it’s either fiction or nonfiction. You can even get into philosophy and politics, which I’ve done on occasion.
My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It’s very visible – more so all the time – but there’s no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don’t think the way that other people do.
The interesting thing about fiction from a writer’s standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.
For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We’ve had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven‘t seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.
The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.
A lot of times, you think of things as being science fiction, but the creation of the ideas makes you want to solve them. Then, in solving them, they give us greater capability.
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right – how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of ‘Optic Nerve,’ I hadn’t even been on a date; I hadn’t had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
One of the things that I really like about young adult fiction is that you can explore the relationships between teens and their parents. I definitely think that teens are a product of their parents. You either end up just like them or you consciously make the decision to be unlike them.
Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that’s because we’re all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.
As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it’s a very small percentage of the total. That’s been changing in the last few years.
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
I don’t know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I’ve always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
If I’m going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
Science fiction writers aren’t in the prediction business; they’re in the speculation business, using ‘hasn’t happened’ or ‘hasn’t happened yet’ to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.
Science fiction was never my thing. I have no interest in it. So I don’t think I could successfully pull off being on a project like that without really losing my mind.
I don’t view my memory as accurate or static – and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality – so ‘autobiographical,’ to me, is closer in meaning to ‘fiction’ than ‘autobiography.’
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work – or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
People are interested in crime fiction when they’re quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.
I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.
In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It’s so schizophrenic.
I think it’s Jerry’s masterful fiction writing.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It’s elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
I think that people have expectations of themselves and other people that are based on these fictions that are presented to them as the way human life and relationships could be, in some sort of weird, ideal world, but they never are. So you’re constantly being shown this garbage and you can’t get there.
Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we’re used to.
I’ve always been interested in science fiction.
Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.
I’ve never been much for self-revelation. In two decades of public life, I always approached the limelight with extreme caution. Not that I kept my personal life off-limits; rather, the personal life I put on display was a blend of fact and fiction.
A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.
I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.
When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.
You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you’re making a fiction film, it’s entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.
It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.
I think the type of actor I am, I tend to play strong leading female characters. The shows I’ve been on happen to be science fiction genre.
Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn’t want to do because the film was very theoretical – the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else.
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.
I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.
I don’t read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
I go into any movie that’s historical fiction thinking, ‘OK, I’m here to watch a work of art, something delivering a series of opinions, and if it’s a good work of art, these opinions become so deeply embedded in complexity and richness that I won’t even be bothered by the opinions. I’ll make my own mind up.’
I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us – you don’t go into debt to get an MFA. It’s not like getting an MBA – you’re not going to buy yourself out.
Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, ‘The Things They Carried‘, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it’s fiction.
I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.
Aren’t most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
There are works of fiction which seek to explain jihadi terrorists as the militant wing of Amnesty International. I don’t buy that.
I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.
Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.
I think there are readers out there and I don’t think the book is dead. And more importantly I don’t think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.
Many fiction writers who put the science in don’t get it right.
One thing I like about historical fiction is that I’m not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you’re obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
I should think just about every young writer – which I was at the time – would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.
Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don’t think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.
Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ wasn’t about a Martian invasion – it was a critique of British colonialism, and… ‘The Time Machine’ is really an indictment of the British class system.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I’ve always read poetry; I’ve always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
I’ve seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It’s such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.
Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, ‘A Song of Ice and Fire‘, as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.
I don’t read fiction at all.
‘Doctor Who‘ is where my love of science fiction and fantasy started. I was introduced to it when I was 8, and I’m still an avid viewer.
I’m pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
I’ve devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don’t have to depend on writing fiction for my income.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
If you look for me, I’m in the fiction section. Romance has its own section.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Truth is stranger than fiction, which is why reality TV is so popular.
It’s great to be able to work on some science fiction. I love the genre.
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I’m writing I don’t like to read other fiction.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn’t require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
It’s always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
Basically, fiction is people. You can’t write fiction about ideas.
Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they’re asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.
I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn’t fiction at all.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.
Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can’t be disproved or shown to be false.
Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
I’m a huge science fiction fan.
Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.
Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It’s a way to understand how the world will look in the future.
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it’s a poem, it’s almost written in my head somewhere.
Science fiction encourages us to explore… all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.
I prefer fact to fiction.
Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
Well, I’m at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don’t know which way to take. It’s not about money, I mean, because I’m established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.
If you write fiction, you’re by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don’t have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you’re not lonely anymore.
Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you’re talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it – or, rather, it’s fiction that allows us to ‘construct’ our world. It’s haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.
I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space… But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it’s stranger than non-fiction as well.
Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.
I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction you’re going to get bashed by critics.
‘Who are we?’ And to me that’s the essential question that’s always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are – at their very best – evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, ‘Is there anyone else out there?’ we’re also asking who we are we in relation to them.
I have done a lot of things outside of Science Fiction, but there has been an almost disproportionate amount of that genre in my body of work. I don’t know what to make of it.
Science fiction is not quirky anymore; we live in a futuristic world now.
In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts… It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that’s quite important… truth with fiction.
Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
Fiction novels, that’s my game.
I remember watching Quentin Tarantino accept an Academy Award for screenwriting for ‘Pulp Fiction.’ If I’d known then that 15 years later one of his movies would again be nominated for an Oscar and I’d be in it – that would be pretty crazy.
I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don’t want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.
Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum.
Historical fiction was not – and is not – meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote ‘War and Peace’ to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.
I adore jokes. They’re a theatrical contrivance, but the irony of all fiction is that you approach reality by avoiding it a bit; you spoof it a bit.
My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid‘s Tale’ when I left high school, which has always been very special to me – it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I’m also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
One of the most interesting things about science fiction and fantasy is the way that the genres can offer different perspectives on matters to do with the body, the mind, medical technology, and the way we live our lives.
I do enjoy reading some science fiction.
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.
I’ve been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my ‘Star Trek’ character and I’ve been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex.
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
So much emotion goes into writing fiction.
In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.
I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
It’s hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
I’ve loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I’ve read quite extensively as an adult.
I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the ‘message,’ even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
If you don’t care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn’t try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
I’d always been a science fiction enthusiast.
I was always attracted to science fiction movies.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.
The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.
Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills – research and organization.
I can remember when ‘Pulp Fiction’ came out. I was, like, 10 years old. But I remember the impact that it had.
Fiction is socially meaningful.
Most modern science fiction went to school on ‘Dune.’ Even ‘Harry Potter‘ with its ‘boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny’ shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered a new culture, adopted a new religion.
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict – because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.
I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
It’s clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn’t feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she’s concerned, she’s just criticising a boyfriend who’d recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.
Science fiction is very healthy in its form.
I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it’s nice to know the people you’re making a movie about.
None of the atrocities in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ are pure fiction. Everything Margaret wrote was something that has happened somewhere in the world to human beings.
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.
Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.
When I die, I’m gonna leave my body to science fiction.
I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they’d never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
I’m most interested in people who’ve lived life in the extreme, which is what draws me to crime fiction.
I don’t think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
Every time I’ve had to do journalistic investigations, I’ve cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It’s the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
I don’t write literary fiction – I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.
When you’re writing fiction, you’re in every character ’cause you can’t help it.
I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.
The funny response to ‘One Mississippi’ continues to be that people don’t know what is true and what’s fiction.
I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn’t have encouragement, but I didn’t have discouragement, because I don’t think anybody knew what that meant.
Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.
I feel sex is a common topic everyone see in content of any television shows be it a fiction or live comedy or a chat show.
The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that ‘Lincoln‘ is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we’ve actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln’s presidency that’s somewhat original.
It’s part of a cycle of stories I’m writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don’t like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn’t interest me because I’m not learning anything about something I’ll actually have to deal with.
I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing.
I was raised on comic books, and I love science fiction.
I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer’s creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
After I’d been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.
I think a child should be allowed to take his father‘s or mother’s name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.
Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that’s not reality, it’s just another aesthetic form of fiction.
It was actually a women’s writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction… so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.
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.
Pushing the boundaries of polite society does not just fall under the purview of crime fiction authors.
If life’s lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.
When you’re writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why?
As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.
I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
There’s a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.
It’s important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he’s writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
Truth is much stranger than fiction and, often, much more powerful.
When I was a child, there was very little money, so I’ve always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life.
Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I’ve had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam… and I’m not happy to be right in all of those cases.
The ‘interactive fiction’ format hasn’t changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn’t since 1700.
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else’s experience, especially reading fiction.
In terms of fiction, I’d rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.
My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
Creating the fictional background for a game world isn’t significantly different from creating a background for fiction.
It may be far in the future, but there’s some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
I love the grandiosity of Hollywood movies, and even in independents, I love the canvas you can tell your story on. I love fiction filmmaking, you really feel like you’re creating something.
I think that’s what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There’s no melodrama; there’s no device, It’s just about a human being.
I want to do some fiction writing, I’ve had some pretty good luck with short stories, I’d like to do a couple of larger things.
I believe that reality TV should be called ‘not reality’ TV; it’s fiction.
As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular – or supremely practical – replies.
Writing fiction is… an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
The genres of the fantastic and the grotesque are far more interesting to me than most mnemonic fiction.
New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.
We’re a very imaginative species; we’re very good at creating fictions.
I grew up reading science fiction.
Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That’s a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it’s not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers.
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.
Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they’re usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there’s a sort of ‘us versus them’ situation. They’re easy to poke fun at.
That’s what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!
My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare‘s day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development – an insight came from that book.
Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn’t exist.
There’s more fiction in my life than in books, so I don’t bother with them.
I’m fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there’s a scientific lesson, for example – when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That’s actually very valuable.
No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.
You look at John Travolta in ‘Pulp Fiction’, you look at Donnie Wahlberg in ‘The Sixth Sense.’ People have liens against them in crazy ways and the audience is always forgiving – if you prove it.
I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore.
People who are readers of fiction aren’t particularly interested in comic books.
I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.
Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry. With its religious fanaticism, reality TV programs and fake news broadcasts being aired by the government, the States feel like they are entering the Dark Ages.
It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they’re driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they’d sound ludicrous!
If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the ‘Times’ might notice you.
We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.
One of the reasons I did this, because I wasn’t really looking for another science fiction film, was that my daughter can see it. She’s 9 and it’s really a good film for all ages.
I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age – 11 or 12 – but I don’t think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn’t good enough!
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.
In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart.
And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.
Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don’t need to be told what to do.
Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being.
I would much rather watch a horror film or science fiction than a comedy. I don’t know why. I just like them. I find them relaxing.
As a boy, my favorite show was ‘Superman‘ and my favorite movie was ‘Star Wars’ – along with other science fiction shows and movies. And I always wanted to fly.
I read everywhere. I read every day. I read on the couch with my dog in the afternoon and at night. I try to read at least two to three hours a day. I read only fiction.
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
Some people just don’t seem to understand the concept of fiction. It is fiction; it ain’t true, folks.
I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.
I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
I tend not to read fiction – I’ll read one novel a year during the summer – but I do read a lot of nonfiction.
I’ve read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I’d be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
I’ve always been drawn to the extremes of human behavior, and crime fiction is a great way to explore the lives and stories of fascinating people.
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
