I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
~By John Dalton ~
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 ~
I rather like getting away from fiction.
~By Penelope Lively ~
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 ~
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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 ~
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 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 ~
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 ~
I don't read fiction at all.
~By Brent Spiner ~
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
~By Bruce Sterling ~
I believe that science fiction is as profound as you want it to be or it can be very simple entertainment, and I'm all for very simple entertainment. Every now and then we all need to come home, veg-out, watch something and not think too deeply about it. It's what you want it to be. We tend to steer clear of being pedantic; it's entertainment first, otherwise we'd be on a lecture circuit.
~By Joe Flanigan ~
Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
~By Ira Glass ~
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
~By V. S. Naipaul ~
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 ~
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
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 ~
But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.
~By Laura Hillenbrand ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.
~By Robert Sheckley ~
A public is a necessary fiction.
~By Rowan D. Williams ~
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 ~
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 ~
They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature, whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions.
~By Ethan A. Hitchcock ~
I quite enjoy science fiction.
~By Lexa Doig ~
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
~By Louis L'Amour ~
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
~By Catherine Drinker Bowen ~
Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.
~By Theodore Sturgeon ~
That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
~By Anthony Holden ~
For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.
~By Mary A. Ward ~
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 ~
Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.
~By Theodore Sturgeon ~
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
~By Rudy Rucker ~
A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.
~By Thomas M. Disch ~
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
~By Robert Morgan ~
The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.
~By Karl Jaspers ~
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 ~
It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.
~By Raymond Queneau ~
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
~By Virginia Woolf ~
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
~By Vernor Vinge ~
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 ~
Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.
~By Manuel Puig ~
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 ~
I'm a fan of short horror fiction... in fact, the most memorable horror I've read is of the short variety... but I have a hard time pulling it off myself.
~By George Stephen ~
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
~By John Updike ~
I get offered a lot of science fiction work and there is a new project in the pipeline called Master Race, set in World War II, but that's a little way off yet.
~By Jeremy Bulloch ~
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
~By Jonathan Lethem ~
Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.
~By Leo Rosten ~
I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say.
~By Dirk Benedict ~
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
~By Penelope Lively ~
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 ~
It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.
~By Nancy Thayer ~
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.
~By Octavia Butler ~
The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
~By Lindsay Wagner ~
I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
~By Jonathan Franzen ~
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 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 ~
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.
~By Mark Haddon ~
Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.
~By Jean M. Auel ~
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 ~
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 ~
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
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 ~
In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.
~By James Gunn ~
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
~By Irvine Welsh ~
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
~By Joseph Wambaugh ~
A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.
~By Frederik Pohl ~
Science fiction still is an idea genre.
~By Sheri S. Tepper ~
There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction.
~By John Le Carre ~
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
~By John McGahern ~
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.
~By Steven Soderbergh ~
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction.
~By Richard Savage ~
We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program.
~By Jeffrey Sachs ~
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
~By Kazuo Ishiguro ~
When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.
~By John C. Hawkes ~
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
~By Elizabeth Moon ~
I'm not really a science-fiction fan, I quite like the idea of getting away from the science-fiction side of it, for two episodes. It was lovely, it was a super story and great fun.
~By Sarah Sutton ~
I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.
~By Laurell K. Hamilton ~
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 ~
I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.
~By Neil LaBute ~
I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
~By Robert Reed ~
Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
~By William Blake ~
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
~By Alain de Botton ~
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 ~
Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.
~By Vincent Canby ~
I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.
~By Nigel Kneale ~
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
~By George Saintsbury ~
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
~By A. E. van Vogt ~
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
~By Raymond Chandler ~
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
~By Mark Twain ~
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 wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
~By Caleb Carr ~
I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
~By Jack Vance ~
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
~By Nursultan Nazarbayev ~
There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.
~By Fred Saberhagen ~
No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.
~By Octavia Butler ~
I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
~By Peter Straub ~
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