Fiction Quotes

Fiction is socially meaningful.

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.

Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction you're going to get bashed by critics.

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.

Life is a means of extracting 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.

People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

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.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

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.

Science fiction still is an idea genre.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

What does it say about a president's policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record? What does it say about the fiction of old liberalism to insist that good jobs and good schools and good wages will result from policies that have failed us, time and again?

What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I'm a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don't think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is.

A public is a necessary fiction.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

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.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

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.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

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.

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.

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?