Fiction Quotations | Page 4

Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

The DC Universe has the best villains in fiction, right? I don't think there's any group of villains collectively or anywhere else that come close to DC's. Joker, Cat Woman, Lex Luthor, are all staples. A lot of the comic book icons are fiction icons.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.

Kane and Abel' is the best popular fiction of all time. As a kid, I wanted to be prime minister when I read 'First Among Equals.

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

Tokyo in the late 1960s seemed to be like one of the futures that science fiction presents. Here was the proto- super-technology of the future, electronically, robotically, blahblahblah, intercut with traditional Japanese cultural patterns, Shinto patterns.

I've always resented the force of attraction that traps me here on Planet Earth. It makes me feel like a bug stuck to a piece of duct tape. Ever since my teenage years, when I used to read a lot of science fiction and took it much too seriously, I've dreamed of somehow reaching escape velocity. I am, you might say, anti-gravity.

NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it's done well, it's not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, '2001,' for example, or the first 'Matrix.' But it takes someone who's got a brain and thinks in order to do really good science fiction.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.

One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those are. They know what to expect and then you have to wrong-foot them. That is the trick of crime fiction. And readers come to crime and graphic novels wanting to be entertained, or disgusted.

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.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

I sometimes wonder what would've happened if I'd entered the competition instead - I'd probably have come nowhere and given up on the whole fiction game.

Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

The first science fiction show on television was 'Tales Of Tomorrow' using scripts from the radio show 'X-1' which used stories from 'Galaxy Magazine' as its source material.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.

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.

When I was fifteen, my father gave me a first edition copy of Ray Bradbury's magnificent work, 'The Martian Chronicles.' I had read other science fiction by noted authors, but this book was something else altogether.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.

I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

With science fiction I think we are preparing ourselves for contact with them, whoever they may be.

The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

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.

Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.

Every vampire fiction reinvents vampires to its own needs. You take what you want.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I think fan fiction is the way most writers start, and the same goes for music and design.

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

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.

It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

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.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.

There's a thing with genre movies and science fiction movies that number two is the charmed; two seems to be the best. I loved 'Terminator 2.'

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.

A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

Starring in a science fiction film doesn't mean you have to act science fiction.

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

'Pulp Fiction' blew my mind; beforehand, I'd watch films and there was a beginning, middle and an end, and that's it. There is in that film, too, but it's out of sequence.

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'

This is my one beef with Hollywood: It's great for movie sales, but they've created this fiction for us that, when you have a hard thing in your life, it's going to get fixed, and then your life will be awesome! Forever!

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

I was born in 1950 and watched science fiction and horror movies on TV and was always really fascinated by them.

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.

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.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.

I like science fiction. I took all the accelerated classes in school. I'm kind of a dork.

I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.

I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.