I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.
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.
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
I like the Sci Fi channel and 'Science Fiction Theatre.' I've been doing a lot of television-watching and thinking about good songs to write.
Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.
First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.
I always take a fiction break in between business books to keep the content from bleeding together.
There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.
People realize that Salieri is not the man we saw in the Amadeus movie. That man had no talent. It was a great movie, but the Salieri character was a big fiction.
I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.
In a science fiction film, you're uniquely responsible to pay respect to the science represented in the movie.
Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.
The history of fan fiction demonstrates how efficient, and effective, women have been at pooling together to get what they want out of their stories. It's been a largely female-driven world.
It's not highly intellectual material. I'm dedicating it to the pulp fiction of the past.
I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.
Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
Like everybody at that age, I read an awful lot of pulp fiction. But at the same time, I also read quite a bit of history and read that as much for pleasure as part of a curriculum.
I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.
To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.
When you write fiction, you can sort of invent more but also pack it with emotions that are very pertinent to you. Whereas with nonfiction, you have to be as factual as possible but also hopefully - also bring... emotional relevance to the piece.
Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series also shows the potential of lighter fantastic fiction. I read the first, and listened to a tape of a later one, and it's fun.
It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
