Fiction Quotes

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.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

With science fiction I think we are preparing ourselves for contact with them, whoever they may be.

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.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

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.

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

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.

I don't always want to read serious fiction. But when I read fiction that's not serious, I don't want to read brain candy. Entertain me, for God's sake.

There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.

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.

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.

I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.

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.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

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.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a 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.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

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.

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.

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.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.