Orson Scott Card Fiction Quotations

The difference between science fiction and fantasy … is simply this: science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees.

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.

A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.

It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...

Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.