One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).
Dramatic fiction - William Shakespeare made his biggest mark writing dramatic love stories.
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.
Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.
For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.
I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don't like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn't interest me because I'm not learning anything about something I'll actually have to deal with.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.
With science fiction I think we are preparing ourselves for contact with them, whoever they may be.
I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.
Poirot is a classic character from fiction, not a MacBook Air; he would not benefit from updates.
Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.
On a book like 'X-Men,' you have to stay true to the established fiction, working with editors to ensure continuity, sometimes across multiple titles.
I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract.
I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.
When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.
I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people - and also so pleasurable - make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There's a chaos agent quality to them: You just don't know who's going to be there or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who's become an enemy.
I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
I like certain subgenres within science fiction and fantasy, and one of those is urban fantasy, and another is steampunk.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.