Science fiction is an extension of science.
One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.
I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.
Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.
Science fiction is something I never understood.
I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'
It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.
'Pulp Fiction' is an amazing film, and I haven't made one nearly as good.
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.
I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!
I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.
Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
I rather like getting away from fiction.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Whether I'll get the chance to write fiction, I don't know. I could do political conspiracy thrillers, couldn't I? With an investigative journalist as the heroine.
Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.
When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.
I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.
I'm a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy - not so much horror because I get a bit scared.
Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.
The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
Some people just don't seem to understand the concept of fiction. It is fiction; it ain't true, folks.
I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.
My translation work has been pretty separate from my fiction, as it was basically an accidental side project that turned into a separate and parallel career.
There's a convention that books are mirrors of the real world, but our fact-obsessed age also wants fiction to be factually based and trustworthy.
Science fiction is very healthy in its form.
I wrote strong advocacy stories, and when I got to fiction, I made a deliberate effort to leave that behind and enter a country where I had no ax to grind, no advocacy issues that I was carrying with me.
No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.
You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise and fall of commercial dynasties.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
