Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.
It’s fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
I’ve been a fan of vampire fiction since way, way back – I loved Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Shirley Jackson, lots of great horror and paranormal fiction.
IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom’s Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.
Some people just don’t seem to understand the concept of fiction. It is fiction; it ain’t true, folks.
When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn’t pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.
I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer’s creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.
My brother is a scientist. He’s a professor at MIT. He brought science fiction into my world.
One of the most interesting things about science fiction and fantasy is the way that the genres can offer different perspectives on matters to do with the body, the mind, medical technology, and the way we live our lives.
If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there’s something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.
I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.
It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
I think that people have expectations of themselves and other people that are based on these fictions that are presented to them as the way human life and relationships could be, in some sort of weird, ideal world, but they never are. So you’re constantly being shown this garbage and you can’t get there.
There’s a science fiction project we really want to make, but it’s very expensive. Hopefully it will happen.
It was actually a women’s writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
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.
That’s the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.
Science fiction is very healthy in its form.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
None of the atrocities in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ are pure fiction. Everything Margaret wrote was something that has happened somewhere in the world to human beings.
When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of ‘Optic Nerve,’ I hadn’t even been on a date; I hadn’t had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it’s no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it’s really just about the money, the perceived prestige.
I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.
Science fiction was never my thing. I have no interest in it. So I don’t think I could successfully pull off being on a project like that without really losing my mind.
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.
I don’t like to read fiction. I like to learn something when I’m reading.
Science fiction is not quirky anymore; we live in a futuristic world now.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It’s easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
The truth is that every writer, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that’s what I think I’m doing.
God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition.
We are living in a science fiction world.
I’m no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it’s got everything: it’s a book of poetry, it’s a book of principle, it’s a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.
My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you’ll get a different answer.
I’ve always been drawn to the extremes of human behavior, and crime fiction is a great way to explore the lives and stories of fascinating people.
‘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.’
I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don’t get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
Pushing the boundaries of polite society does not just fall under the purview of crime fiction authors.
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age – 11 or 12 – but I don’t think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn’t good enough!
I like working closely with artists. I think that’s very important in fantasy and science fiction – the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.
There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it – mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction – I don’t know if I want to do that anymore.
Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that’s because we’re all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.
I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.
Dramatic fiction – William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, ‘oh Lord, they’re not going to want to go here’. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that’s brave.
Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.
I’ve often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying, ‘This is fiction.’
The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental.
I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.
It’s important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he’s writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
