We love a lot of vampire fiction - both fiction in which the vampires are enemies to be battled or stone cold foxes to be dated.
In fiction, if people like one of your books, they tend to pick up your other books as well.
There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.
As a fiction writer, all I need is a laptop, and when I'm not teaching, I travel as much as I can, applying for every research grant and overseas gig I hear of, then trying to extend those trips as far as the stipends will go. I love to travel alone.
Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.
This is my one beef with Hollywood: It's great for movie sales, but they've created this fiction for us that, when you have a hard thing in your life, it's going to get fixed, and then your life will be awesome! Forever!
When I'm not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things... but I feel like it's my job to write about the way things are.
My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.
The things that I've enjoyed most are not really science fiction. They are not much fun to make because there are so many toys involved. They are fun for directors who like toys, like Ridley Scott, but they are not a lot of fun to make. A lot of hanging around, changing this and that.
I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.
I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.
I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.
Most writers of entertainment fiction tend to receive controversial reviews.
I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.
Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.
Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book!
Catholic fiction of the type we're publishing is stories that we know faithful Catholics will enjoy - stories they can escape with, laugh at, cry with; stories that will enrich their lives.
I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.
I confess I didn't read the 'Green Arrow' comics before coming to play Shado. The comic books are not as easily accessible in Hong Kong as they are in the States. I do enjoy superhero fiction, though.
I like to read really good books - anything that's really great, whether it's fiction, non-fiction, how-to, or whatever.
I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.
When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.
We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.
'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.
With nonfiction, I had to learn how to be a clear communicator, but it was also a relief to be able to articulate some of my political ideas and beliefs. I also try to do that in my fiction, but I'm more interested in asking questions that lead to more questions, mysteries that lead to more mysteries, rather than immediate answers and solutions.
Life is much weirder than fiction; nothing's more absurd.
I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.
Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.
You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
It's not that I'm apolitical... In my youth, I was a freelance political speechwriter, which taught me a lot about writing fiction, I must add.
One of the dangers of science fiction, particularly bad science fiction, is that you have these scenes where the characters turn to a blackboard and start explaining how this faster-than-light drive works, or something like that. We never really have those conversations in real life. That's not part of the way we interact as human beings.
Truth is stranger than fiction, which is why reality TV is so popular.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
