I’m not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot.
I’ve always been a big fan of science fiction and of the worlds of the spiritual and the mystic.
I do enjoy Gothic fiction or books about zombies if they are well written and I like vampires.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
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.
New technologies are rapidly giving rise to unprecedented methods of warfare. Innovations that yesterday were science fiction could cause catastrophe tomorrow, including nanotechnologies, combat robots, and laser weapons.
I don’t think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.
I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the president, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that’s not the kind of fiction that I like to read.
I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
I love science fiction.
I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.
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.
How you solve your problems are quite different. In non-fiction, you can always go back to the research, whereas in fiction, you have to go back to yourself – which is a little bit scary.
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
My books deliberately provide no answers or messages. I’m drilled in the habit of objectivity and also aware that the steady drip of fiction has more power than facts to shape opinion, so I handle it with caution.
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 play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems. I believe mankind has looked at climate change in the same way, as if it were a fiction.
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.
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.
Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it’s stranger than non-fiction as well.
Women are far and away the bigger consumers of fiction than men, but men are still far and away the more reviewed, the more critically esteemed, the more respected. That can get frustrating.
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
I’d love to do a movie where the monster is human, where the issue is not otherworldly, or horror or science fiction.
I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.
Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
Because I’m such a creative person, and I’ve always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I’d be doing the things I’m doing today.
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
If you don’t care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn’t try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
If you look for me, I’m in the fiction section. Romance has its own section.
I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.
Within the realm of fiction, it is always tempting to set one’s stories in a dystopian future, where all our misgivings about state power can be shown in full force.
People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they’re somehow discovering reality, but of course that’s just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer.
I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.
I’m a big ‘Star Wars’ fan and grew up watching the movies. I read all the books and have read ‘Star Wars’ fiction that went between the newest trilogy and the original trilogy and it was part of my childhood.
I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don’t. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It’s a hard way to learn to write. I don’t recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
When I’m not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I’ve been writing quite constantly lately so I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction – philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It’s faux literary fiction I can’t stand.
I don’t really have special rituals, but I don’t try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I’m truly concentrating.
There is a real connection between Philosopy and fiction.
Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I’m walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.
The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
I do enjoy reading some science fiction.
That’s what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!
Getting out to protest, this is something real and, I would say, something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action.
A close associate of his gave an interview in which the book was described as quotes ‘fiction from being to end’. I suffered trial by tabloid for a couple of weeks, lots of insults in the press, in the columns – this man should be put in the tower and so on.
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.
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.
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.
Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction – namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject – skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
