Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make sense: 'Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.'
Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
Science fiction has always had a dark side. There has been a touch of the irrational and absurd in the genre from the very beginning.
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.
The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.
Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.
It really wasn't my thing. It still isn't my thing, the whole science-fiction action thing. I prefer simpler, character-based movies.
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.
The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.
[Science fiction is] a specialized type of fantasy, in which the prime assumption usually is a new scientific discovery or invention.
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.
In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.
I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.
Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
I think one of the reasons I love science fiction so much is that it's - when it's ideally done right, it's a reflection on ourselves.
Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.
Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
Aging has brought me greater liberty in fiction. When I was young I was harder on myself. I wrote with an idea of absolute seriousness.
I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.
So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
Next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.'
Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.
It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.
The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.
Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance.
My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.
Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.
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.
Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.
As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.
Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.
Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.
I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.
Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?