I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
I played lots of games, and I was a fan of gaming, so I was always looking for new games. I was also a science fiction and fantasy fan, growing up, in games and books and movies.
I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.
The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.
There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.
If I had stayed purely a horror writer or thriller writer, I might have more of a presence in those particular genres, and I'd certainly have more individual titles to market, since it's much easier to write pure genre fiction than it is to create something different.
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
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.
There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.
With fiction, I felt like I could bring to bear my full imagination, my entire heart, and so you feel very vulnerable. It's not your physical life, but it's everything else, so it felt like a lot was at stake.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.
I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.
We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
I don't read fiction at all.
My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.
And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi.
The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
