For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.
I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.
When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.
The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.
There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.
I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.
It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.
Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.
I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.
Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.
Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.
I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
Fiction isn't memoir and memoir isn't fiction.
I've always been a mystery fan. My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick out an Agatha Christie book. I was in fifth grade or something and very proud of being in the adult fiction aisles. I tore through 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles.'
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
For me, choosing between fiction and nonfiction is really only about picking the right tool for the job.
I definitely want to act and I want to sing. If those two fall through, I want to become a writer, probably, like a songwriter for other people, or a novel writer. I write a lot, and I read a lot. I like reading fiction.
I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.
I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
This is the real magic of fantasy fiction: it can feed souls and change lives.
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life.
I can't seem to help writing love stories. I definitely crave romance. When I was young, I craved romance in books, but I didn't want to read just romance - love plays such a big part in our lives, it shouldn't be cut out and restricted to its own fiction.
The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.
