Fiction Quotes

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

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.

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.

A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

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.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

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.

Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media.

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.

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.

Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.

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.

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.

It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.

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.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

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!

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

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.