One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
I write fiction that reflects Islamic logic: fictional worlds where cause and effect are governed by Muslim rationale. However, my characters do not necessarily behave as 'good' Muslims; they are not ideals or role models.
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it's nice to know the people you're making a movie about.
Science fiction always has had strains of pessimism and optimism weaving through its historical development, sometimes one dominating and then the other, usually depending on the state of the world.
As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.
I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all. I like 'Detective Frost.'
My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.
God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition.
I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.
Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.
The good thing about songwriting is you don't have to delineate between what's true and what's fiction; records aren't put on the shelf that way. Books are, movies are, but records aren't.
Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.
That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.
The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.
I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
WWE is a company that produces fiction. It's a soap opera that runs 52 weeks a year without reruns.
I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.
Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that's because we're all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.
A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction.
I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing.
I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.
I've actually usually been wary of taking on science fiction as an actor because it's really tough to do. It's really difficult to execute. There's often lots of prosthetics, green screen and special effects, and it can get very technical.
I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do - and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.
It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.
