I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.
You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.
Fantasy and science fiction are where my brain lives.
Smart authors, faced with storms, chose to create umbrellas. That's why a diverse group of authors banded together to create The Fiction Writer's Co-op, which will work to find innovative ways to promote each other's work and cheer each other on in a very competitive field.
Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.
The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
'Filk' is the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community - you get parodies, you get traditional music that's had the words slightly modified, and you'll also get just original works that have been written about science fiction and fantasy works, or with science fiction and fantasy themes.
Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.
Most people assume wrongly that science fiction is a male-based genre, when, in fact, there are far more women who tune into sci-fi than anyone expects.
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
A public is a necessary fiction.
There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.
My taste in watching things runs from dramas and low-budget films to high-end fantasy/science fiction.
There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.
It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.
You look at John Travolta in 'Pulp Fiction', you look at Donnie Wahlberg in 'The Sixth Sense.' People have liens against them in crazy ways and the audience is always forgiving - if you prove it.
All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
I have this theory about science fiction movies in that, when the space race sort of died, a lot of people sort of lost hope.
I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.
We are living in a science fiction world.
I feel like we're going to see a lot more movies that mix documentary style with fiction, more along the lines of 'District 9.'
What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I'm a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don't think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is.
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.
Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
I do enjoy Gothic fiction or books about zombies if they are well written and I like vampires.
