Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
~By Mark Twain ~
I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.
~By Tim LaHaye ~
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
~By Leslie Fiedler ~
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.
~By Paul Kane ~
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.
~By Sarah Zettel ~
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
~By Jeanette Winterson ~
The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.
~By Harold Acton ~
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
~By Aneurin Bevan ~
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.
~By Orson Scott Card ~
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
~By A. C. Benson ~
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
~By Octavia Butler ~
It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.
~By Cory Doctorow ~
I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.
~By Leslie Nielsen ~
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
~By Jonathan Lethem ~
I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.
~By Judith Krantz ~
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 ~
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.
~By Louise Brown ~
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
~By Rick Moody ~
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
~By Jacques Barzun ~
The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a fiction.
~By Milton R. Sapirstein ~
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.
~By Penelope Lively ~
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.
~By Chris Chocola ~
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
~By Joan D. Vinge ~
I have taught history on the high school and college levels, and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian, The National Institutes of Health, and numerous colleges and universities, mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.
~By Jack L. Chalker ~
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.
~By Barney Oliver ~
Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
~By Heinrich Heine ~
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.
~By Curtis Sittenfeld ~
Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
~By George Murray ~
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
~By J. G. Ballard ~
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
~By Don DeLillo ~
If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.
~By Harold Brodkey ~
Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved.
~By Alan Dean Foster ~
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
~By Terri Windling ~
Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.
~By Jerry B. Jenkins ~
I sometimes wonder what would've happened if I'd entered the competition instead - I'd probably have come nowhere and given up on the whole fiction game.
~By Paul Kane ~
I think Junior is certainly a science fiction premise as is Twins, as is Dave, beyond Ghostbusters.
~By Ivan Reitman ~
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
~By Penelope Lively ~
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.
~By Dirk Benedict ~
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
~By Octavia Butler ~
Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.
~By Hugo Gernsback ~
Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.
~By Saul Steinberg ~
And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.
~By Tim LaHaye ~
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
~By Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
I've always been a fan of science fiction films, and I've never been able to put my particular spin on it.
~By Ivan Reitman ~
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 ~
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
~By Bruce Sterling ~
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 ~
I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies.
~By Poppy Z. Brite ~
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.
~By William Trevor ~
Star Trek wouldn't die. There were a whole lot of young people who were touched by the thought process of science fiction. If you watched a cop show, there wasn't anything that was going to stimulate your mind.
~By Gary Lockwood ~
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 ~
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.
~By Anthony Holden ~
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.
~By Walter Jon Williams ~
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 ~
And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.
~By Stanley Schmidt ~
I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.
~By David O. Russell ~
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 ~
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 ~
In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
~By Robert Morgan ~
They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.
~By Bruce Boxleitner ~
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
~By Robert Morgan ~
I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.
~By Theodore Sturgeon ~
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
~By James Joyce ~
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
~By Charles de Lint ~
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 ~
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
~By Dorothy Allison ~
Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.
~By Poppy Z. Brite ~
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
~By Robert Morgan ~
I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
~By Penelope Lively ~
We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.
~By Miguel Ferrer ~
Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
~By Marquis de Sade ~
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
~By Henry Miller ~
The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.
~By Jason Mraz ~
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 ~
When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?
~By Bill Nye ~
I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
~By Louise Brown ~
Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too.
~By Kevin J. Anderson ~
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
~By Oscar Wilde ~
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
~By Philip Pullman ~
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
~By Katherine Anne Porter ~
If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
~By Richard Bach ~
People who love science fiction really do love sex.
~By Susie Bright ~
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.
~By Judith Krantz ~
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 ~
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
~By Jeanette Winterson ~
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
~By Martin Amis ~
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.
~By Jean M. Auel ~
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
~By Richard Hughes ~
Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.
~By Jean M. Auel ~
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.
~By Rudy Rucker ~
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 ~
I wasn't a big science fiction aficionado, there were a few films like 2001 or Blade Runner that were favorites of mine, but since I started this series I have gained more respect for the genre and become more of a fan myself.
~By Joe Flanigan ~
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.
~By Carl Clinton Van Doren ~
Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
~By Francis Bacon ~
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
~By Oscar Wilde ~
It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.
~By Keren Ann ~
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 ~
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