Quotes and Sayings about Fiction
"First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: Fiction, First, Magic, Writing)
"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."
- Harold Acton
(Related: Time, Fiction)
"I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize."
- Kate Adie
(Related: Fiction, Judges)
"The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction."
- Alfred Adler
(Related: Fiction)
"A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth."
- Edward Albee
(Related: Truth, Fact, Fiction, Play)
"Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts."
- Brian Aldiss
(Related: Science, Fiction, Scientists)
"Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning."
- Dorothy Allison
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Lies, Meaning)
"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."
- Martin Amis
(Related: Money, Strength, Addiction, Evil, Fiction, Mind)
"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."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Science, Fiction, Football, Talk, Wine, Writers)
"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."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Home, Science, Time, Work, Day, Fiction, Night, Reading, Research)
"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."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Science, Time, Fiction)
"It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs."
- Keren Ann
(Related: Fiction, Moods, Songs)
"If you make a movie about Elizabeth I, how much of the dialogue is her real words? Audiences know when they go see a movie that it is fiction."
- Jean-Jacques Annaud
(Related: Audiences, Fiction, Words)
"Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series also shows the potential of lighter fantastic fiction. I read the first, and listened to a tape of a later one, and it's fun."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Fiction, First, Fun, Potential)
"I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Fiction, Want, Will)
"It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Isaac Asimov
(Related: Science, Fiction, May, Salvation, Today)
"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
- Isaac Asimov
(Related: Science, Catastrophes, Fiction, May, Problems, Writers)
"I prefer fact to fiction."
- Richard Attenborough
(Related: Fact, Fiction)
"I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics."
- Richard Attenborough
(Related: Fiction, Shame)
"I love the fact that it's not only about Star Trek, but about science fiction in general, and science."
- Rene Auberjonois
(Related: Love, Science, Fact, Fiction)
"Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life."
- Louis Auchincloss
(Related: Life, Fiction, Perfection)
"My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Science, Romance, Fiction, Press)
"Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Science, Work, Fantasy, Fiction)
"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."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Science, Astronomy, Fiction, Future, Physics, Ships, Space)
"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."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Science, Fiction, Mystery, Research, Will)
"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."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Science, Ideas, Books, Fantasy, Fiction, Public)
"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."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Science, Time, Books, Fantasy, Fiction)
"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."
- Richard Bach
(Related: People, Being, Practice, Will)
"Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Needs)
"Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century."
- J. G. Ballard
(Related: Science, Fiction, Literature, Reality)
"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."
- J. G. Ballard
(Related: Fiction, Reality, Writer)
"People realize that Salieri is not the man we saw in the Amadeus movie. That man had no talent. It was a great movie, but the Salieri character was a big fiction."
- Cecilia Bartoli
(Related: Talent, People, Character, Fiction, Man)
"The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers."
- Jacques Barzun
(Related: Danger, May, Will, Writers)
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
- Frederic Bastiat
(Related: Government, Fiction)
"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world."
- Jean Baudrillard
(Related: America, Fiction, World)
"I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me."
- Peter Benchley
(Related: Fiction, Writer)
"A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay."
- Dirk Benedict
(Related: Fiction, Play)
"I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say."
- Dirk Benedict
(Related: Books)
"I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction."
- A. C. Benson
(Related: Fiction)
"I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction."
- Aneurin Bevan
(Related: Fiction, Newspapers)
"Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction."
- William Blake
(Related: Contradiction, Fiction, Will, World)
"Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist."
- Bodhidharma
(Related: Fiction, Mind)
"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."
- Bodhidharma
(Related: Body, Language, Senses)
"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."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Work, Attention, Trying, Writers, Writing)
"I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Love, Fiction, Writing)
"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."
- Catherine Drinker Bowen
(Related: Biography, Fact, Facts, Fiction, Writing)
"That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: Women, Being, Fiction)
"It's not highly intellectual material. I'm dedicating it to the pulp fiction of the past."
- Bruce Boxleitner
(Related: Fiction, Past)
"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."
- Bruce Boxleitner
(Related: Science, Crime, Earth, Fiction, Mystery, Now)
"Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision."
- Marion Zimmer Bradley
(Related: Science, Fiction, Mind)
"People who love science fiction really do love sex."
- Susie Bright
(Related: Love, Science, Sex, People, Fiction)
"Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases."
- David Brin
(Related: Science, Islam, Fiction, Right)
"There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives."
- David Brin
(Related: Science, Doubt, English, Fiction, Training)
"Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on."
- David Brin
(Related: Age, Change, Science, People, Fiction, Literature)
"Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: Food, Fiction, Liquor)
"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."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: Movies, Effect, Fiction, Film, Hollywood, Horror, Writers)
"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."
- Harold Brodkey
(Related: Fiction, Reality, Word, Writer)
"Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Work, Books, Fiction, First, Trade)
"I was looking to do something non-fiction because I had done a strip, 'My Mom Was a Schizophrenic.' I really enjoyed the process of doing that strip, despite its subject matter. To do it I'd had to do a lot of research and reading and I figured I'd like to do that again."
- Chester Brown
(Related: Mom, Reading, Research)
"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."
- Louise Brown
(Related: Fiction, Formula, Goodness, Romantic)
"I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas."
- Louise Brown
"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."
- Jeremy Bulloch
(Related: Science, War, Work, Fiction, Project, Race, World, World war)
"I would like to do a science fiction film some day. Star Wars seems really to have destroyed the genre, which at one time offered great musical opportunities."
- Carter Burwell
(Related: Science, Time, Day, Fiction, Film)
"Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Astronomy, Fantasy, Fiction, First, Interest)
"The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Fiction, Open)
"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."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Books, Country, Direction, Fiction, World)
"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."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Fiction, Interest, Writing)
"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."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Fantasy, Fiction)
"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."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Fiction, Open)
"I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Time, Fiction, Reading, Writing)
"I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing."
- Yancy Butler
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction."
- Lord Byron
(Related: Truth, Fiction)
"For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction."
- Lord Byron
(Related: Truth, Fiction)
"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."
- James Cameron
(Related: Science, Escapism, Fantasy, Fiction, Sense)
"Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives."
- Vincent Canby
(Related: Experience, Events, Feeling, Fiction, Importance, Living)
"Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world."
- Vincent Canby
(Related: Curiosity, Fiction, World)
"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."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Work)
"There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Society, Community, Fiction, Reason)
"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."
- Caleb Carr
(Related: Artist, Fiction, Nothing, Writer)
"There are some subjects that can only be tackled in fiction."
- John Le Carre
(Related: Fiction)
"Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."
- John Le Carre
(Related: Fiction, Writer)
"In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It's so schizophrenic."
- Jonathan Carroll
(Related: Science, Women, Fantasy, Fiction)
"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."
- Jack L. Chalker
(Related: History, Science, Technology, Health, College, Fiction, School)
"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."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: Art, Desire, End, Fiction, Nothing, Writer)
"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."
- Iris Chang
(Related: People, Civil liberties, Fiction, Future, Injustice, Reason, Will)
"People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy."
- John Cheever
(Related: People, Confusion, Fiction, Morals, Philosophy)
"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
- John Cheever
(Related: Fiction)
"For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction."
- C. J. Cherryh
(Related: Art, Science, Fiction, World)
"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."
- Charles W. Chesnutt
(Related: Change, Men, Life, Fiction, Man)
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Related: Fiction, Literature, Luxury, Necessity)
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Related: Life, Fiction, Journalism, Newspapers, Popular, World)
"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."
- Chris Chocola
(Related: Business, Balance, Fact, Fiction, Income, Reality)
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
- Tom Clancy
(Related: Difference, Fiction, Reality, Sense)
"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories."
- Arthur C. Clarke
(Related: Science, Fiction, Politicians)
"His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction."
- Gerald Clarke
(Related: Fiction, Theory)
"Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."
- Gerald Clarke
(Related: Journalism)
"Before Truman, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously."
- Gerald Clarke
(Related: Journalism)
"Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Talent)
"I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Thought, Development, Creation, Fiction, Intellect, Intuition, Invention, Will)
"If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?"
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Fiction, Saying)
"Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself."
- Mason Cooley
"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."
- Francis Ford Coppola
(Related: Science, Care, English, Fiction, Job, Saying)
"Today's youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their 'sore and yellow' as this splendid man's creations have in mine!"
- Peter Cushing
(Related: Fear, Affection, Influence, Man, Today, Will, Youth)
"Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: People, Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"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."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: Fear, Ideas, Day, Fiction, Writer)
"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."
- John Dalton
(Related: Discipline, Day, Fiction, University, Want, Writing, Years)
"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."
- James D'arcy
(Related: Work, History, Drama, Fiction, Fun, Responsibility, Sense)
"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."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: People, Reading, Want)
"I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Work, Fiction, Job, Want)
"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."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Beauty, Inspiration, Fiction, Influence, Language)
"I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying."
- Anita Diament
(Related: Fiction, Trying)
"Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years."
- Jared Diamond
(Related: History, Science, Fiction, Isolation, Study, Years)
"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
- Philip K. Dick
(Related: Science, Knowledge, Fiction, Talk, Writers)
"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?"
- Vin Diesel
(Related: People, Challenge, Emotions)
"A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development."
- Thomas M. Disch
(Related: Development, Fiction)
"It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction."
- Cory Doctorow
(Related: Science, Fiction, Writing)
"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: Fiction)
"I quite enjoy science fiction."
- Lexa Doig
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Discovery, Fiction, Nothing, Pleasure)
"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."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Work, Fiction, Followers, Land, Mind, Popular)
"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."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Life, Power, Sympathy, American, Fiction, First, Limits)
"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."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Death, Conquest, Fiction)
"It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal."
- Carol Ann Duffy
(Related: Women, Poetry, Fiction)
"Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning."
- Carol Ann Duffy
(Related: Truth, Beginning, Trying)
"Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Children, Fiction)
"Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Truth, Content, Desire, Rest, Sickness)
"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."
- Friedrich Durrenmatt
(Related: People, Fiction, Man, Order, State)
"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."
- Robert Duvall
(Related: People, Culture, Entertainment, Fiction, Film, Right, Want)
"Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on."
- Buddy Ebsen
(Related: Fiction, Limits, Value, Writing)
"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."
- David Eddings
(Related: Science, Extreme, Fiction, Mankind, Opinion, Popularity, Theory)
"There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale."
- Ralph Ellison
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Magic, Now, Scientists)
"Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by."
- Ralph Ellison
(Related: Fiction, Reality)
"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Reality)
"The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess."
- Tracey Emin
(Related: Idea, Fiction)
"I thought it must be pure science fiction. But when I checked it out I found a lot of magazine articles that actually supported the theory behind the book which was incredible. That's when I decided to acquire the rights of the book and everything went from there."
- Roland Emmerich
(Related: Science, Thought, Fiction, Rights, Theory)
"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."
- Julius Erving
(Related: Life, People, Books, Fiction, Want)
"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."
- Raymond E. Feist
(Related: Science, Work, Day, Fiction, Lady, Years)
"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."
- Miguel Ferrer
(Related: Art, Confidence, Earth, Fiction, Job, Tools, Will, Writing)
"The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Existence, Fiction)
"I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Sex, American, Force, Influence, Literature, Publishing)
"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."
- Joe Flanigan
(Related: Science, Home, Being, Entertainment, Fiction, First, Now, Want)
"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."
- Joe Flanigan
(Related: Science, Fiction, Respect)
"There is a real connection between Philosopy and fiction."
- Ken Follet
(Related: Connection, Fiction)
"Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections."
- Malcolm Forbes
(Related: Facts, Fiction, Old)
"The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating."
- John M. Ford
(Related: Effect, Language)
"Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction."
- John M. Ford
(Related: Fiction, World)
"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."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Science, Thought, Being, Growing up, Reading, Writer)
"I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994."
- Jonathan Franzen
"I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting."
- Antonia Fraser
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Work, Existence, Fiction, Folk)
"We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?"
- John Kenneth Galbraith
(Related: Biography, Fiction)
"Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction."
- Helen Garner
(Related: Life, Money, Fiction, Now, Writer)
"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."
- Helen Garner
(Related: HusbFiction, Now, Unconscious)
"If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine."
- William Gass
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Gil Gerard
(Related: Science, Day, Earth, Fiction, Film, Reality)
"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."
- Hugo Gernsback
(Related: Science, Fiction, First)
"I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot."
- Ira Glass
(Related: Fiction, Question)
"Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question."
- Ira Glass
(Related: Purpose, Driving, Fiction, Needs, Question)
"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."
- Mark Goddard
(Related: Science, Act, Cowboys, Fiction, Play, Will)
"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."
- Arthur Golden
(Related: Time, Mother, Thought, Fiction, Living, Reading, Writing)
"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!"
- Terry Goodkind
(Related: Driving, Fiction, Sound)
"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."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Reason, Trying)
"I love science fiction."
- Pam Grier
(Related: Love, Science, Fiction)
"Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener."
- Nanci Griffith
(Related: Life, Fantasy, Fiction, May, Songs, Sound, Writer)
"I've loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I've read quite extensively as an adult."
- Matt Groening
(Related: Science, Books, Fiction)
"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."
- Philip Guedalla
(Related: History, Biography, Fiction)
"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
(Related: Science, Technology, Fiction, Myth, Mythology)
"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."
- James Gunn
(Related: Change, Nature, Science, Technology, People, Character, Environment, Fiction, Present, Universe, Want)
"That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them."
- James Gunn
(Related: Science, Work, Idea, Content, Fiction, First)
"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."
- David Guterson
(Related: History, Politics, News, World, Writing)
"Fiction is socially meaningful."
- David Guterson
(Related: Fiction)
"As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Children, Fiction, Jobs, Literary, Possibilities)
"I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Fiction, Literary)
"Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Fiction)
"When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Children, Fiction, Right, Writing)
"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."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Being, Fiction, Identity, Now)
"Some people just don't seem to understand the concept of fiction. It is fiction; it ain't true, folks."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: People, Fiction)
"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."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: Science, People, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Research, Writing)
"Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction."
- Frank Harris
(Related: Fiction)
"There's more fiction in my life than in books, so I don't bother with them."
- Richard Harris
(Related: Life, Books, Fiction)
"When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Imagination, Fiction)
"I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Fiction, Prose, Want, Writing)
"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."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Love, Poetry, English, Fiction, Literature, Passion)
"Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction."
- Heinrich Heine
(Related: Genius, Fiction)
"Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction."
- Jimi Hendrix
(Related: Imagination, Science, Fiction, Key, Rest)
"Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it."
- John Hersey
(Related: History, Opportunity, Fiction, Journalism)
"My work was entirely nonfiction."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Work)
"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."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Work, Creativity, Fiction, Infinite, Potential, Writer, Writing)
"But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Research)
"My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head."
- S. E. Hinton
(Related: People, Ideas)
"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."
- Ethan A. Hitchcock
(Related: Dreams, Nature, Truth, Being, Danger, Reality)
"I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Life, Love, Fiction, Risk)
"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."
- Anthony Holden
(Related: Being, End, Insults, Man, Press, Quotes)
"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."
- Anthony Holden
(Related: Beginning, Being, End, Fact, Fiction, Living)
"Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it's stranger than non-fiction as well."
- Brad Holland
(Related: Truth, People, Fiction, Intellectuals)
"All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them."
- Richard Hughes
(Related: Business, Fiction, Questions)
"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."
- John Hume
(Related: History, Age, Time, Curriculum, Fiction, Pleasure)
"Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn't want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else."
- Isabelle Huppert
(Related: Experience, Funny, Sacrifice, People, Actors, Fiction, Film, Games, Space, Violence, Want)
"I was a science fiction junkie for a long time."
- William Hurt
(Related: Science, Time, Fiction)
"The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction."
- Thomas Huxley
(Related: Men, Time, Doctrine, Fiction, Sense)
"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."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Autobiography, Conversation, Fiction)
"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."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Fiction, Songs, Writer, Writing)
"Fiction is life with the dull bits left out."
- Clive James
(Related: Life, Fiction)
"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."
- Karl Jaspers
(Related: Life, Interest, Law, Study)
"Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Successful, Fiction, Today)
"My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Movies, Dream, Ideas, Fiction)
"Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Truth, Fact, Fiction)
"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."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Fiction)
"I think all fiction should be fair game for the Christian market, except porn, of course."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Christian, Fiction)
"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."
- William L. Jenkins
(Related: President, Years)
"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."
- Denis Johnson
(Related: Fiction, Loneliness, Lonely)
"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."
- James Joyce
(Related: Legal, Age, Mother, Father, Fiction, Name, Will)
"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."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Time, Thought, Fiction, Today, Writer)
"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."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Fiction, Personality, Respect, Writers, Writing)
"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."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Competition, Fiction, Wonder)
"What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative."
- Tracy Kidder
"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."
- Daniel Dae Kim
(Related: Science, Work, Body, Fiction)
"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
- Stephen King
(Related: Truth, Lie, Fiction)
"I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway."
- Nigel Kneale
(Related: Science, Fiction, Writing)
"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."
- Harry Knowles
(Related: Science, Time, Hope, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Perfection, Project, Years)
"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."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Love, Peace, War, Music, Poetry, Fiction, Painting)
"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
- Dean Koontz
(Related: Fiction, Literary)
"And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have."
- Jerzy Kosinski
(Related: Art, Purpose, Fiction, Will)
"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."
- Judith Krantz
(Related: Fiction, Fun, Writing, Years)
"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."
- Judith Krantz
(Related: Dating, Experience, Men, College, Fashion, Fiction, Housekeeping, Job, Writing, Years)
"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."
- Stanley Kubrick
(Related: Music, Feelings, Emotion, Fiction, Film, Meaning, Moods)
"I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction."
- Neil LaBute
(Related: Movies, Science, Thought, People, Fiction, Writer)
"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."
- Lactantius
(Related: Truth, Attention, Authority, Fiction, Investigation, Judgment, Weight)
"New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: God, People, Being, Fiction, Writers)
"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."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Fiction, Writer)
"I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"I've written many nonfiction books, but that's a special gift."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Books)
"I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life."
- Wally Lamb
(Related: Life, Opportunity, Fiction, Limits)
"However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously."
- Wally Lamb
(Related: Fiction, May, Pretty, Writers, Writing)
"I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days."
- Anne Lamott
"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."
- Louis L'Amour
(Related: History, Time, Biography, Fiction, May, World)
"I've always been interested in science fiction."
- Martin Landau
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it."
- Rose Wilder Lane
(Related: Life, Quality, Effort, Fiction, Killing, Writing)
"Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?"
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important... truth with fiction."
- Janet Leigh
(Related: Truth, Dream, Facts, Fiction, Order, Reality)
"Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time."
- Doris Lessing
(Related: Science, Time, Fiction, Space)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Work, Fiction, Information, Obvious)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Fiction)
"I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Fiction)
"As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary."
- Charles de Lint
(Related: People, Difference, Fact, Fiction)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction, Pleasure, Writing)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Time, Fiction, Past, Present)
"You learn a lot, writing fiction."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Character, Occupation)
"I rather like getting away from fiction."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction, May, Writing)
"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."
- Gary Lockwood
(Related: Science, Thought, People, Fiction, Mind)
"I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community."
- Audre Lorde
(Related: Parenting, Community, Fiction, Gay, Lesbian, Relationships)
"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."
- Brian Lumley
(Related: Time, American, Class, Fiction, Writer)
"Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media."
- Robert Lutz
(Related: Fiction, Media)
"Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left."
- Robert Lynd
(Related: History, Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Literature, Quarrels, Will)
"Palaeontologists use fiction all the time."
- Norman Macleod
(Related: Time, Fiction)
"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."
- Aimee Mann
"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."
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(Related: Home, Wife, Day, Fiction)
"In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth."
- Peter Matthiessen
(Related: Truth)
"In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience."
- Peter Matthiessen
(Related: Experience, Idea, Day, Fact, Fiction)
"I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority."
- Peter Matthiessen
(Related: Inferiority, Superiority, Fiction)
"I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction."
- Armistead Maupin
(Related: Fiction)
"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."
- Armistead Maupin
(Related: Truth, Fiction)
"Science Fiction will never run out of things to wonder about until the human race ceases to use its brain."
- Julian May
(Related: Science, Fiction, Race, Will, Wonder)
"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."
- John McGahern
(Related: Truth, Facts, Fiction)
"One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Life, Fiction, Invention)
"If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction."
- Matthew Modine
(Related: Art, Science, Direction, Example, Fiction, Film, Gold, Language, Photography, Space)
"Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like."
- Rick Moody
(Related: Work)
"Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that."
- Rick Moody
(Related: Life, Facts, Fiction)
"My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Science, Feeling, Fiction, World)
"There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Science, Character, Being, Books, Fantasy, Fiction, Old)
"When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Books, Fiction)
"I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Science, Fiction, Future, May)
"It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does."
- Daniel Keys Moran
(Related: Science, Fiction, World, Writing)
"All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent."
- Jeanne Moreau
(Related: Talent, Fiction)
"Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Events, Fiction, Intimacy)
"I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, American, Fiction, Past, Writing, Years)
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Fiction, Language)
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Example, Fiction, Poets, Writing)
"I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, Fiction, Will, Writing)
"I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies."
- Rob Morrow
(Related: Movies, Morality, Fiction)
"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."
- Joe Morton
(Related: Science, Fact, Fiction)
"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."
- Jason Mraz
(Related: Fiction, Song, Songs)
"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."
- Kate Mulgrew
(Related: Marriage, Character, Actor, Respect, Talking)
"Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it."
- Bill Mumy
(Related: Science, Fiction, Television, Years)
"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."
- Alice Munro
(Related: Want)
"Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction."
- George Murray
(Related: Poetry, Fiction, Writing)
"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."
- George Murray
(Related: Money, Poetry, Success, People, Books, Fiction, Writing)
"I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction."
- George Murray
(Related: Fiction, Pressure)
"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."
- George Murray
(Related: Poetry, Fiction, Respect)
"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Fiction, World)
"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."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Love, Work, Fiction)
"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."
- V. S. Naipaul
(Related: Career, Fiction, Literary)
"Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place."
- Mira Nair
(Related: Life, Truth, Fiction)
"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."
- Nursultan Nazarbayev
(Related: Science, People, Being, Fiction, Past, Space)
"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."
- Graham Nelson
(Related: Fiction)
"I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being."
- Jack Nicholson
(Related: Movies, Science, Being, Fiction, Now)
"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."
- Leslie Nielsen
(Related: Science, Favorite, Fiction, Mind)
"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."
- Jeremy Northam
(Related: Truth, Heart, Fiction, Job, Paradox)
"All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries."
- Jeremy Northam
(Related: Nature, Truth, Being, Events, Human nature)
"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?"
- Bill Nye
(Related: Science, Time, Travel, Earth, Fiction, Now, Problems, Shadow)
"It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Fiction, Poor, Writer)
"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."
- Michael O'Donoghue
(Related: Science, Desire, Fiction, Insects)
"We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings."
- Ben Okri
(Related: Fiction, Humanity)
"I'm not the best audience for that because I'm not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that."
- Gary Oldman
(Related: Science, Ships, Space)
"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."
- Sharon Olds
(Related: Time, Fiction, Writers)
"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."
- Barney Oliver
(Related: Science, Destiny, Earth, Fiction, Moon, Stars, Years)
"People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books."
- Harvey Pekar
(Related: People, Books, Fiction)
"I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel."
- Martin Lewis Perl
(Related: Travel, History, Science, Biography, Fiction, Mathematics)
"It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering."
- Thomas Perry
(Related: Awareness, Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it."
- Thomas Perry
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life."
- Ralph Peters
(Related: Life, Death, Fiction, Reality, Writing)
"We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue."
- Plato
(Related: Virtue, Children, First, Importance, Promotion)
"The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden."
- John Podhoretz
(Related: Science, Mystery)
"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, People, Fiction, Research)
"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)."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Fiction, First, Reading, Years)
"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."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, English, Fiction, Literature, Old)
"It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Fiction, Reading)
"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."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Fact)
"I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Fiction, Pretty)
"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."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Care, Fiction, Want)
"In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Science, Fiction, Future)
"I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction."
- Katherine Anne Porter
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Result, Will)
"To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction."
- Chaim Potok
(Related: Life, Beginnings, Fiction, Religious, Tradition)
"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."
- Chaim Potok
(Related: Work, End, Fiction, Pretty, Writer)
"There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Work, End, Fiction)
"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."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Science, Fantasy, Fiction, Military)
"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."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Science, Selling, Sense, Years)
"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."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Science, America, Fiction, First, President, Writers)
"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."
- Lawrence Clark Powell
(Related: Strength, Vision, Literature, Needs, Writer)
"The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry."
- Reynolds Price
(Related: Poetry, Fiction, Reading)
"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."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Reality)
"For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Imagination, Fiction, Order, Unconscious)
"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!"
- Philip Pullman
(Related: Education, English, Importance, Literature, Reading, Years)
"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."
- Raymond Queneau
(Related: Fiction, Value)
"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."
- Raymond Queneau
(Related: History, Character, Fiction)
"One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey."
- Raymond Queneau
(Related: Fiction)
"Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting."
- William Randolph
(Related: Truth, Fiction)
"Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book."
- Robert Reed
(Related: Science, Development, Fiction, First, Reading)
"I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business."
- Robert Reed
(Related: Business, Science, Thought, Being, Fiction)
"I'd always been a science fiction enthusiast."
- Ivan Reitman
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"I've always been a fan of science fiction films, and I've never been able to put my particular spin on it."
- Ivan Reitman
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"I think Junior is certainly a science fiction premise as is Twins, as is Dave, beyond Ghostbusters."
- Ivan Reitman
(Related: Science, Fiction, Twins)
"Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women."
- Nora Roberts
(Related: Women, Romance, Fiction)
"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."
- Jim Rohn
(Related: Truth, People, Fiction, Literature, Reason, Study)
"Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense."
- Leo Rosten
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Sense)
"You read a script and its based on 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction', and it goes right in the bin."
- Tim Roth
(Related: Dogs, Fiction, Right)
"The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime."
- Karl Rove
(Related: Growth, Country, Fiction, Future, Prosperity)
"Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail."
- Rudy Rucker
(Related: Science, Being, Fiction, Now, Wonder, Writer)
"One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments."
- Rudy Rucker
(Related: Science, Thought, Fiction)
"Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens."
- Rudy Rucker
(Related: Science, Work, Fiction, Rules, World, Writers)
"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."
- Rudy Rucker
(Related: Science, Ideas, Fiction, Play)
"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."
- Salman Rushdie
(Related: Morality, Acceptance, Fiction, Reality)
"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."
- David O. Russell
(Related: Experience, Cinema, Fiction, Moments, Song)
"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."
- Richard Russo
(Related: End, Fiction, Literary)
"I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about."
- Richard Russo
(Related: Nature, Fiction, Talk)
"I had never seen much of Star Trek, or any other science fiction, before I was cast. But Seven's wonderful."
- Jeri Ryan
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"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."
- Fred Saberhagen
(Related: Power, People, Advice, Fiction, Friends, Relatives, Writing)
"There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons."
- Fred Saberhagen
(Related: Science, People, Fantasy, Fiction)
"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."
- Fred Saberhagen
(Related: Thought, People, Fiction)
"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."
- Fred Saberhagen
(Related: Science, Time, People, Day, Effort, Fiction, Reading)
"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."
- Jeffrey Sachs
(Related: Being, Debt, Russia, World)
"Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction."
- Marquis de Sade
(Related: Imagination, Truth, Fiction)
"But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: Fiction, Gold, Style)
"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."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: History, Absence, Facts, Fiction, Literary, Literature, Name, Prose)
"That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think."
- Walter Salles
(Related: Fiction, Open, Windows)
"I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films."
- Walter Salles
(Related: Fiction, Years)
"The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a fiction."
- Milton R. Sapirstein
(Related: Marriage, Mother, Fiction)
"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."
- Fred Savage
(Related: Time, Actors, Forget, Now, Reading, School, Writers)
"Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction."
- Richard Savage
(Related: Sex, Truth, Thought, Contradiction, Fiction, Whim)
"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."
- Richard Schickel
(Related: Fate)
"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."
- Stanley Schmidt
(Related: Fiction, Now, Writers)
"With science fiction I think we are preparing ourselves for contact with them, whoever they may be."
- Dwight Schultz
(Related: Science, Fiction, May)
"I think if I'm going to do a science fiction, I'm going to go down a new path that I want to do."
- Ridley Scott
(Related: Science, Fiction, Want)
"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."
- Ridley Scott
(Related: Science, Fiction, Future)
"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."
- Michael Shanks
(Related: Science, Goals, Actor, Fact, Fiction, Options, Years)
"I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy."
- Al Sharpton
(Related: Love, People, Fiction, Philosophy, Theology)
"Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form."
- Irwin Shaw
(Related: Fiction, Writers)
"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."
- Robert Sheckley
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole."
- Robert Sheckley
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"Science fiction is very healthy in its form."
- Robert Sheckley
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"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."
- Robert Sheckley
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"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."
- Joe Shuster
(Related: Science, Time, Fiction, First, Formula)
"But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms."
- Dan Simmons
(Related: Science, Hope, Fiction)
"I've been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my Star Trek character and I've been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex."
- Marina Sirtis
(Related: Science, Character, Fiction)
"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."
- Curtis Sittenfeld
(Related: Fiction, Rituals)
"See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers."
- John Sladek
(Related: Truth, Answers, Journalism, Research, Writing)
"I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world."
- John Sladek
(Related: Science, Fiction, Sense, World)
"Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction."
- Steven Soderbergh
(Related: Fiction, Reality)
"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
- Susan Sontag
(Related: Art, Science, Disaster, Fiction)
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
- Susan Sontag
(Related: Fiction, Mythology)
"I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction."
- Steven Spielberg
(Related: Science, Fiction, Want)
"I don't read Science Fiction."
- Brent Spiner
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"I don't read fiction at all."
- Brent Spiner
(Related: Fiction)
"Having spent so much time in a fictional world, I prefer to read about the real world."
- Brent Spiner
(Related: Time, World)
"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."
- Norman Spinrad
(Related: Science, History, Beginnings, Biography, Fiction, Pleasure, Reading)
"The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part."
- Richard Stallman
(Related: Idea, Practice)
"Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction."
- Saul Steinberg
(Related: Science, Answers, Fiction, Questions)
"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."
- George Stephen
(Related: Time, Fact, Fiction, Horror, Variety)
"I've devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don't have to depend on writing fiction for my income."
- George Stephen
(Related: Business, Family, Time, Advertising, Effort, Fiction, Income, Past, Support, Writing, Years)
"On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance."
- George Stephen
(Related: Dance, Fact, Fiction, Horror, Income, Now, Writing)
"I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it."
- Bruce Sterling
(Related: Research)
"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."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
(Related: Life, Fiction, Man, Play)
"Life is a means of extracting fiction."
- Robert Stone
(Related: Life, Fiction)
"Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity."
- Peter Straub
(Related: Work, Fiction, Want, Writers)
"I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time."
- Peter Straub
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep."
- Janet Street-Porter
(Related: Women, Sex, Fiction, Forget, Romantic, Sleep)
"In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: Science, Poetry, Fiction, Limits, Literary)
"Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: Humor, Compassion, Fiction, Mind, Writer, Writers, Writing)
"I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: Science, Fiction, First, Homosexuality, World)
"Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: People, Ideas, Fiction)
"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."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: Fiction, May, Reality, Talking, Will, World)
"Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: Life, Fiction)
"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."
- Sarah Sutton
(Related: Science, Idea, Fun)
"I like going back and writing fiction."
- Julia Sweeney
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"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."
- Amy Tan
(Related: Family, Discouragement, Encouragement, Fiction, Literary)
"I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life."
- Amy Tan
(Related: Life, Thought, Fiction, First, Jazz)
"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."
- Quentin Tarantino
(Related: Character, Fiction, Study, Trying)
"I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all."
- Quentin Tarantino
(Related: Fiction)
"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Life, Character, Blood, Fiction)
"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."
- Allen Tate
(Related: Society, Desire, Doctors)
"The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers."
- Sheri S. Tepper
(Related: Science, People, Fiction, Scientists, Writers)
"Science fiction still is an idea genre."
- Sheri S. Tepper
(Related: Science, Idea, Fiction)
"To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two."
- Sheri S. Tepper
(Related: Science, Idea, Ideas, Fantasy, Fiction)
"It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise."
- Nancy Thayer
(Related: Life, Fiction)
"Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us."
- Paul Theroux
(Related: Life, Chance, Fiction)
"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."
- William Trevor
(Related: Mother, Fiction, Motherhood, Mothers, Value)
"The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction."
- William Trevor
(Related: Imagination, Fiction, Thinking, Understanding)
"There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes."
- William Trevor
(Related: Autobiography, Fiction, Pain, Pleasure)
"Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything."
- Ivana Trump
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"I was always attracted to science fiction movies."
- Tina Turner
(Related: Movies, Science, Fiction)
"If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction."
- Scott Turow
(Related: Life, Fiction)
"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Sense)
"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Possibilities)
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Possibilities)
"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Truth, Fiction, Sense, Wonder)
"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
- John Updike
(Related: Poetry, Criticism, Fiction, Open, Sea, Writing)
"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."
- Holly Valance
(Related: People, Buying, Entertainment, Reading, Want, Will, Wrong)
"I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all."
- Jack Vance
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction."
- Jack Vance
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect."
- Jeff Vandermeer
(Related: Hope, Effect, Fiction, Film)
"Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith."
- Gore Vidal
(Related: Business, Faith, Countries, Fiction, Writing)
"Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?"
- Alfred de Vigny
(Related: Eyes, Fact, Fiction)
"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."
- Joan D. Vinge
(Related: Science, Fantasy, Fiction, Literature, Reading, Variety)
"The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors."
- Vernor Vinge
(Related: Science, Fiction, Will, Writers)
"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."
- Vernor Vinge
(Related: Science, Time, Ideas, Consciousness, Fiction, Months, Now, Writing)
"Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago."
- Tony Visconti
(Related: Science, Fiction, Today, Years)
"I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old."
- A. E. van Vogt
(Related: Science, Fiction, First, Old, Years)
"There's a science fiction project we really want to make, but it's very expensive. Hopefully it will happen."
- Larry Wachowski
(Related: Science, Fiction, Project, Want, Will)
"The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do."
- Lindsay Wagner
(Related: Science, Fact, Fiction, Want)
"I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art."
- David Foster Wallace
(Related: Art, Fiction, Today)
"Fiction's about what it is to be a human being."
- David Foster Wallace
(Related: Being, Fiction)
"I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again."
- Joseph Wambaugh
(Related: Being, Pleasure, Research)
"Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued."
- Joseph Wambaugh
(Related: Time)
"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."
- Lalla Ward
(Related: Science, Work, Fiction, Fun, Man)
"In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction."
- Mary A. Ward
(Related: Art, Trust, Choice, Fiction, Instinct)
"For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures."
- Mary A. Ward
(Related: Marriage, Fiction)
"I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything."
- Sigourney Weaver
(Related: Science, Fiction)
"One of the reasons I did this, because I wasn't really looking for another science fiction film, was that my daughter can see it. She's 9 and it's really a good film for all ages."
- Sigourney Weaver
(Related: Science, Daughter, Fiction, Film)
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Imagination, Life, Fiction)
"I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters."
- Margaret Weis
(Related: Science, Artists, Fantasy, Fiction)
"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."
- Irvine Welsh
(Related: History, Religion, Science, Fiction, Philosophy, Reading, Writing)
"I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction."
- Irvine Welsh
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists."
- Eudora Welty
(Related: Fiction, Respect, Sense, Writing)
"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Fiction, Reality)
"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."
- Edmund White
(Related: Art, Performance, Biography, Discovery, Fiction, Research, Sense)
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Fiction)
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Work, Autobiography, Fiction, Man, Woman)
"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Duty, Fiction)
"A public is a necessary fiction."
- Rowan D. Williams
(Related: Fiction, Public)
"Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science."
- Walter Jon Williams
(Related: Science, History, Poetry, Biography, Fiction, Literature, Philosophy, Want)
"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."
- Walter Jon Williams
(Related: Science, Fiction, Invention, Novelty, Writer)
"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."
- Joe Wilson
(Related: People, American, Fact, Fiction, Giving, Interest, Party, Press, Value)
"Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different."
- Robert Anton Wilson
"Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame."
- Robert Anton Wilson
(Related: Time, Blame, Ego, Fiction)
"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."
- Terri Windling
(Related: Science, Business, Fantasy, Fiction)
"If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you."
- Jeanette Winterson
(Related: Change, Fiction)
"I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion."
- Jeanette Winterson
(Related: Character, Confusion)
"To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language."
- Jeanette Winterson
(Related: Fiction, Language, Past)
"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."
- Tom Wolfe
(Related: Art, Fiction, Public, Romantic)
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Life, Fiction)
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Money, Fiction, Woman)
"Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today."
- Herman Wouk
(Related: Being, Fiction, Tax, Income, Today)
"The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns."
- Herman Wouk
(Related: Being, Fiction, Tax, Income, Today)
"When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction."
- Steven Wright
(Related: Science, Body, Fiction)
"I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror."
- Sarah Zettel
(Related: Science, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror)
"Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers."
- Sarah Zettel
(Related: Life, Science, Environment, Fiction, Now, Possibilities, Research, World)
"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."
- Sarah Zettel
(Related: Science, Fact, Fantasy, Fiction, Research, Writing)
"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."
- Terry Zwigoff
(Related: Fiction, Film, Sense)