Fiction Quotations | Page 5

Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.

I mainly read non-fiction, and that's probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don't know.

I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing.

The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life.

There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.

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 love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that's a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

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.

I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.

I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.

Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.

Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, 'Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.'

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.

'Knowing' is one of those movies where you're going to get the spectacle, and you're going to have the entertainment in the grand science fiction tradition. But also, it will perhaps stimulate some discussion to help you sort out on your own where you might choose to go in terms of your own needs. Now, I say that without preaching.

I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

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.

For feel-good fiction to work, there has to be an element of darkness.

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.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

Pulp Fiction is my favorite movie of all time.

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.

It's interesting - I think superheroes get much more unfair derision. There are so many good superhero books being done. Science fiction is almost more reputable, I guess, at least a step up from poor superheroes.

That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.

I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?

I am not interested in producing fiction for Indian television at all, the reason being that I don't understand the medium. I can be a judge or a host; I can do that as an individual. But to produce TV content, you have to know the game.

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Anyone who says, 'Books don't change anything,' or - more commonly - that crime fiction is the wrong genre for promoting social change - should take a closer look.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

I've always been a science fiction fan since I had understood the conception of what a story was.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.

Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

There are three things I look for in a story - it has to be a thriller; I cannot see myself writing literary fiction or a saga! There has to be a historical connection; otherwise, the adrenalin will not flow. And I will try to bridge the gap between 'Rozabal' and 'Chanakya'.

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.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.

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.

Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn't like it, it is it.

I didnt have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.

I'm a sci-fi girl. If I can have anything in life, I'd want tons of great science-fiction movies and stories. It's so progressive, beautiful, and imaginative.

The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all.

I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life.

I believe that reality TV should be called 'not reality' TV; it's 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.

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.

Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.

As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.

We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

I was always attracted to science fiction movies