Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
~By Heinrich Heine ~
There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.
~By Julius Erving ~
Science Fiction will never run out of things to wonder about until the human race ceases to use its brain.
~By Julian May ~
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
~By Robert Lynd ~
In the meantime, I just have to create those realistic goals about the fact that I don't have a ton of options as an actor who's been on a science fiction show for 8 years.
~By Michael Shanks ~
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
~By Mark Twain ~
I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
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.
~By Raymond Queneau ~
Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction.
~By John M. Ford ~
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
~By J. M. Coetzee ~
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
~By Richard Schickel ~
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
~By Tom Wolfe ~
Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.
~By Jerry B. Jenkins ~
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
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.
~By George Murray ~
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.
~By Gabriel Garcia Marquez ~
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
~By John Le Carre ~
For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.
~By Manuel Puig ~
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
~By Leslie Fiedler ~
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
~By Elizabeth Moon ~
Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.
~By Tony Visconti ~
I prefer fact to fiction.
~By Richard Attenborough ~
For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.
~By Aimee Mann ~
Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.
~By Jeremy Northam ~
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
~By Ben Okri ~
Now that I'm taking some time off from school, I've been reading a lot to make sure I don't forget everything. It's mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the '40s and '50s.
~By Fred Savage ~
Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.
~By John Le Carre ~
There is an odd sense of responsibility attached to appearing in a drama about a real piece of history. A work of fiction is fun.
~By James D'arcy ~
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
~By Ralph Ellison ~
My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.
~By Jonathan Lethem ~
Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
~By Mark Haddon ~
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
~By John Kenneth Galbraith ~
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
~By Lawrence Clark Powell ~
It was interesting to do a completely fictional piece. You know, Saving Private Ryan was not a fictional piece! So the challenge was: How do you incorporate real emotions? How do you incorporate aspects that people are going to be able to identify with?
~By Vin Diesel ~
Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.
~By Bodhidharma ~
Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.
~By Malcolm Forbes ~
I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.
~By Kevin J. Anderson ~
Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.
~By Buddy Ebsen ~
Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum.
~By John Hume ~
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
~By Ursula K. Le Guin ~
Whether you've done anything wrong or not people will write whatever they want, so it's just a matter of not reading it, not buying into it, and hopefully the people that do read it realise that it's just fictional stories for entertainment.
~By Holly Valance ~
If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
~By Denis Johnson ~
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.
~By Fred Saberhagen ~
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.
~By Joe Shuster ~
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
~By Isaac Asimov ~
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.
~By Kathy Acker ~
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
~By William Gass ~
I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.
~By David Guterson ~
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
~By Vladimir Nabokov ~
It would have been easier to have a male protagonist, but I didn't want people to assume that Nikki Hill was me in her entirety because a lot of people just don't like me and I don't think they would be interested in reading about me, even in the fictional context.
~By Christopher Darden ~
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
~By Amy Tan ~
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
~By Octavia Butler ~
For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.
~By Harry Knowles ~
I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
~By Robert Reed ~
Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.
~By Lord Byron ~
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.
~By Mark Goddard ~
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
~By Robert Stone ~
I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life.
~By Alice Hoffman ~
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.
~By Irvine Welsh ~
I have done a lot of things outside of Science Fiction, but there has been an almost disproportionate amount of that genre in my body of work. I don't know what to make of it.
~By Daniel Dae Kim ~
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
~By Katherine Anne Porter ~
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
~By Francis Ford Coppola ~
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.
~By Guillermo Cabrera Infante ~
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.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
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.
~By Penelope Lively ~
I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.
~By Jerry Pournelle ~
The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.
~By Graham Nelson ~
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.
~By Laura Hillenbrand ~
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
~By Allen Tate ~
Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
~By Peter Straub ~
I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.
~By Steven Spielberg ~
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
~By Richard Russo ~
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
~By Walter Jon Williams ~
Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
~By Rose Wilder Lane ~
I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it.
~By Ridley Scott ~
I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.
~By Fred Saberhagen ~
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.
~By Peter Matthiessen ~
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
~By Joseph Wambaugh ~
The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.
~By John Podhoretz ~
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.
~By Graham Greene ~
Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
~By Theodore Sturgeon ~
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
~By Irwin Shaw ~
I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
~By Richard Russo ~
The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a fiction.
~By Milton R. Sapirstein ~
I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.
~By Brian Lumley ~
You read a script and its based on 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction', and it goes right in the bin.
~By Tim Roth ~
I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.
~By Sigourney Weaver ~
You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
~By Robert Duvall ~
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
~By Alice Munro ~
As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.
~By Charles W. Chesnutt ~
Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.
~By Marion Zimmer Bradley ~
A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
I think Douglas was a real one-off. He was so clever and so intelligent and so well read in real science that he could make science fiction work as well as it did. And just such fun to have around, he was just such a lovely man.
~By Lalla Ward ~
I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.
~By Jean M. Auel ~
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
~By E. L. Doctorow ~
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
~By Stanley Kubrick ~
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.
~By Sharon Olds ~
I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.
~By Jean M. Auel ~
I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
~By Kate Adie ~
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