I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
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.
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.
The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.
The exquisite truth is to believe in something that maybe you know is a fiction, but you believe in it willingly.
I can’t get enough of ‘Pulp Fiction.’ I just love it; it still holds up. And it didn’t win Best Picture, by the way. Didn’t win.
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.
For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
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.
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.
It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you’ll find a dozen or so who are neither.
That’s why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.
Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else’s experience, especially reading fiction.
Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
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.
I was always attracted to science fiction movies.
I thought it must be pure science fiction. But when I checked it out I found a lot of magazine articles that actually supported the theory behind the book which was incredible. That’s when I decided to acquire the rights of the book and everything went from there.
But I don’t read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
I rather like getting away from fiction.
All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.
The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life.
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.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
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.
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.
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.
It’s never too late – in fiction or in life – to revise.
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.
I’m a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it’s dangerous if I’m seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
I think truth is weirder than fiction.
I think what happens is you write how you grew up. And I was born on the prairie, and so everything is kind of spare on the prairie. And so I’m just used to writing in that way. ‘Sarah, Plain and Tall’ was that way. And most of my fiction is. I like writing small pieces. Somehow it just suits me.
When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it’s all part of making sense of who I am.
I love the fact that it’s not only about Star Trek, but about science fiction in general, and science.
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
I love science fiction.
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 think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate – it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.
The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.
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.
Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
It is simply science fiction fantasy to say that, if you do not raise the debt ceiling, that everything is going to collapse.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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.
That is partly why women marry – to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.
Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can’t deliver.
On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That’s part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it’s all on loan.
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.
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.
There’s an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction – a sweet spot there.
Many fiction writers who put the science in don’t get it right.
Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
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.
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
I think that when you’re writing fiction what you’re doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don’t normally like to admit to.
All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.
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.
