It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
~By Mark Twain ~
In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
~By Peter Matthiessen ~
It began as this desire to do this science fiction movie about perhaps one of the last insects left that nobody's done anything on, which is the cockroach - and truly one of the most frightening insects.
~By Michael O'Donoghue ~
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 ~
My work was entirely nonfiction.
~By Laura Hillenbrand ~
It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
~By Piers Anthony ~
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
~By David Foster Wallace ~
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 ~
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
~By Dan Simmons ~
I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
~By Jack Vance ~
I'd always been a science fiction enthusiast.
~By Ivan Reitman ~
For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
~By C. J. Cherryh ~
But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.
~By Helen Garner ~
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 ~
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 ~
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
~By Jeanette Winterson ~
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 ~
I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
~By Wally Lamb ~
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
~By Aneurin Bevan ~
Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.
~By Nora Roberts ~
As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.
~By J. M. Coetzee ~
I quite enjoy science fiction.
~By Lexa Doig ~
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 ~
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
~By Alfred de Vigny ~
When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
~By Vernor Vinge ~
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 ~
Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media.
~By Robert Lutz ~
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
~By Elizabeth Moon ~
Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
~By Rose Wilder Lane ~
I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.
~By Armistead Maupin ~
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 '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 ~
All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
~By Richard Hughes ~
I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.
~By John C. Hawkes ~
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.
~By Sigourney Weaver ~
The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.
~By Herman Wouk ~
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
~By Doris Lessing ~
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 ~
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.
~By Norman Spinrad ~
I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.
~By George Murray ~
Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.
~By Edmund White ~
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
~By Paul Theroux ~
I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.
~By Joe Morton ~
Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.
~By Raymond E. Feist ~
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.
~By James Cameron ~
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
~By Elizabeth Moon ~
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.
~By Neil Gaiman ~
Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.
~By Lactantius ~
I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
~By Martin Lewis Perl ~
I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.
~By Quentin Tarantino ~
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
~By J. G. Ballard ~
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 ~
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 ~
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
~By John Cheever ~
Fiction is socially meaningful.
~By David Guterson ~
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
~By Don DeLillo ~
I'd always wanted the show to be more reality based science fiction, something along the lines of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I consider to be the classic science fiction film.
~By Gil Gerard ~
There were probably, what, 300 science-fiction members in the SFWA, of whom probably a hundred were active members in the sense that they were selling something every year, or every couple years.
~By Jerry Pournelle ~
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
~By J. M. Coetzee ~
So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.
~By Robert Sheckley ~
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
~By Iris Chang ~
In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.
~By Carl Clinton Van Doren ~
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 ~
Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.
~By Poppy Z. Brite ~
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
~By Ralph Ellison ~
Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).
~By Frederik Pohl ~
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
~By John Updike ~
Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.
~By Mason Cooley ~
Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction.
~By Richard Savage ~
We are talking about someone who has lived. It must be honored in every respect. The fictional can take any kind of channel - according to the actor's marriage to the character.
~By Kate Mulgrew ~
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
~By Robert Lynd ~
Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
~By Heinrich Heine ~
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
~By Salman Rushdie ~
It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they're driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they'd sound ludicrous!
~By Terry Goodkind ~
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
~By Robert Louis Stevenson ~
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 ~
My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.
~By S. E. Hinton ~
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 ~
There's a science fiction project we really want to make, but it's very expensive. Hopefully it will happen.
~By Larry Wachowski ~
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
~By Jim Rohn ~
I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.
~By Jessica Hagedorn ~
Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.
~By Brian Aldiss ~
Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.
~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 ~
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 ~
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.
~By Jonathan Coe ~
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 ~
For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.
~By Friedrich Durrenmatt ~
I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
~By John C. Hawkes ~
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
~By Jessamyn West ~
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
~By Mark Twain ~
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.
~By Jerry Pournelle ~
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 ~
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 ~
And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.
~By Octavia Butler ~
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 only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
~By Sheri S. Tepper ~
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
~By Oscar Wilde ~
The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.
~By Carl Clinton Van Doren ~
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