Fiction Quotes

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life.

I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

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.

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.

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.

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

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.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

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.

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.

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.

I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.

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.

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

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.

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

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.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.

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.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.