Fiction Quotes

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.

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.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn't want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

I've always been a fan of science fiction films, and I've never been able to put my particular spin on it.

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

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.

I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.

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.

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.