Fiction Quotes

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.

I've always been a big fan of science fiction and of the worlds of the spiritual and the mystic.

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.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

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.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

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.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

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.

It is simply science fiction fantasy to say that, if you do not raise the debt ceiling, that everything is going to collapse.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

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.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

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.

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.

Science fiction was never my thing. I have no interest in it.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

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.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

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.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

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.