The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.
Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.
Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.
I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.
Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.
There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’
Honest fiction may be made to supplement the pulpit.
Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define the "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival".
There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.
I love science fiction stuff - I'm a bit of a dweeb like that.
Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
I shall speak facts; but some will say I deal in fiction.
I sing about UFOs and extraterrestrials, and so I designed a UFO fashion. It includes science-fiction bikinis and Bermuda Triangle shorts.
The imagination is too often regarded merely as an indefinite, untraceable, indescribable something that does nothing but create fiction.
That is as true for fiction or non-fiction. The writer has to really know their subject. It is really important to remember that the readers are a lot smarter than the writer. Also, good writing has to do with rewriting. You will never get it right the first time. So you rewrite and rewrite again until you get it right. Until you, and the reader, will be able to visualize what you're writing about.
I always say that 'Futurama' is real, and 'The Simpsons' is fiction.
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.
'Star Wars' is more fairy tale than true science fiction.
writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!
What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.
Science fiction annoyed me because it was like, "Why is the world as it is not enough for you?"
