I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F – it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.
‘Pitchfork’ said something like, ‘Michael Imperioli wrote a book that sounds like Lou Reed fan fiction,’ which maybe it is. It’s fiction, and I’m a fan. But it’s not about me, and it’s not a Lou Reed book.
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.
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.
I not only read Raymond Chandler but read all the crime fiction classics. I was hooked.
I’d always been a science fiction enthusiast.
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.
If life’s lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.
The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.
To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life – that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.
Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer’s head. In fiction, you just hope you’re precise enough to convey the intended effect.
I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that’s so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.
The best fiction stays with you and changes you.
Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it’s going to make them a better person.
Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.
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.
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.
Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.
Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.
When I’m working, I always read stuff that’s as far away from what I’m working on as possible, so I’ll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.
As a kid, I didn’t read a great deal of fiction, and I’ve forgotten most of what I did read.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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.
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it’s nice to know the people you’re making a movie about.
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
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.
They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.
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.
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.
Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in ‘Black Mask’ magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.
Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
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.
I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.
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 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.
The capacity you’re thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it’s science fiction, horror or really anything. I’m just drawn to quality. I don’t think ‘Darkness Falls’ is horror; there isn’t any gore by any stretch of the imagination.
Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
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.’
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
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.
It was hard for me to believe. I would look down and say, ‘This is the moon, this is the moon,’ and I would look up and say, ‘That’s the Earth, that’s the Earth,’ in my head. So, it was science fiction to us even as we were doing it.
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
