I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.
Fictions of law must be consistent with justice.
I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.
To me, it's science fiction for me to do the things I've been blessed to do in this industry.
The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.
I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there.
Reality is in the business of killing off fiction.
My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.
I'd like to imagine that "dreamoir" becomes a subgenre of nonfiction, maybe ultimately because I'd love to read many more dreamoirs by other writers - poets and memoirists especially.
Sometimes strange fiction, becomes grim reality.
The hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.
Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.
I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.
Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
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.
