We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.
~By Kevin J. Anderson ~
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 ~
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
~By Paul Theroux ~
If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.
~By Scott Turow ~
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 ~
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 ~
The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
~By Lindsay Wagner ~
I finally decided one day, reading science fiction magazines of the time, I could do at least as well as some of these people are doing. So I finally made a serious effort.
~By Fred Saberhagen ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
~By Susan Sontag ~
My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.
~By Jerry B. Jenkins ~
Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.
~By Robert Anton Wilson ~
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 ~
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 ~
Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
~By Heinrich Heine ~
I think Junior is certainly a science fiction premise as is Twins, as is Dave, beyond Ghostbusters.
~By Ivan Reitman ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
~By Octavia Butler ~
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.
~By Paul Kane ~
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
~By A. E. van Vogt ~
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 ~
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 ~
I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me.
~By Peter Benchley ~
Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.
~By Jean M. Auel ~
I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
~By Anne Lamott ~
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
~By Lord Byron ~
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 ~
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.
~By Rick Moody ~
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.
~By Jonathan Coe ~
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 ~
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 ~
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
~By Roald Dahl ~
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
~By E. L. Doctorow ~
Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously.
~By Gerald Clarke ~
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 ~
Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.
~By Joe Wilson ~
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
~By Leslie Fiedler ~
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
~By Robert Stone ~
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
~By Dorothy Allison ~
But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.
~By Laura Hillenbrand ~
I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.
~By David Eddings ~
The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.
~By William L. Jenkins ~
Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
~By Rose Wilder Lane ~
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 ~
Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.
~By Theodore Sturgeon ~
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 ~
Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.
~By Brian Aldiss ~
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
~By Katherine Anne Porter ~
It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
~By Piers Anthony ~
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 ~
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 ~
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
~By John Kenneth Galbraith ~
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 ~
Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
~By Peter Straub ~
The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.
~By John M. Ford ~
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 ~
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 doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.
~By Thomas Huxley ~
Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.
~By Leo Rosten ~
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 ~
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
~By Ursula K. Le Guin ~
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
~By George Murray ~
Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.
~By Arthur Golden ~
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 ~
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
~By Reynolds Price ~
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 ~
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
~By Alfred de Vigny ~
I love the fact that it's not only about Star Trek, but about science fiction in general, and science.
~By Rene Auberjonois ~
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
~By Aneurin Bevan ~
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
~By Terry Zwigoff ~
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
~By Philip Guedalla ~
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
~By Elizabeth Moon ~
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 ~
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 ~
A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
~By Chaim Potok ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 rather like getting away from fiction.
~By Penelope Lively ~
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 ~
One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.
~By Rudy Rucker ~
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
~By Vladimir Nabokov ~
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 ~
There's a science fiction project we really want to make, but it's very expensive. Hopefully it will happen.
~By Larry Wachowski ~
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
~By Elizabeth Moon ~
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
~By Rudy Rucker ~
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
~By Octavia Butler ~
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 read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
~By Martin Lewis Perl ~
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 ~
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 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 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 used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.
~By Peter Matthiessen ~
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