I like beautiful writing, pain, unexpected humor, and the message that, at the last second, people are going to be kind to each other. It almost doesn't matter what the genre is.
Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors.
I never thought I would do a game show, but now I guess I'm now officially in that genre.
I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.
Superhero movies have become a genre unto themselves, and I didn't really grow up on superhero movies. I grew up on genre movies before superhero was a genre.
A lot of times, actors and directors don't want to repeat something. I don't think we're repeating something, but I think there's certainly a genre that we're in, and we're happy to embrace it.
Action-adventure, that genre, only works for me if you can care about the characters. If the hero's not taking some kind of a journey, then there are no stakes - and no stakes, then you don't care if he lives or dies, wins or loses.
There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
There's been a shift: Country music is popular music now. Every other genre wants to come over to our land.
I keep waiting for a paradigm shift to happen that will let network and studio execs see that sci-fi is the same as any other genre in terms of how you approach it - logically, character-based, with challenging ideas and forward thinking - but I worry that it might never happen in my lifetime.
I think George R. R. Martin made fantasy grow up. He brought a level of reality into the storytelling where you realize the good guys don't always win and anyone can die, because that's how life works. Bringing that level of reality into the story I think forced the genre to mature in a lot of ways that it hadn't prior.
The 'Bourne' films totally reimagined and elevated the action genre.
There is a renaissance of really great genre entertainment happening. But it's become incredibly audience-specific.
I was a late bloomer. I was 38 when my first book was out and 43 when my first crime novel was out. I had a story that could only be told as a crime story. I think the genre is good; it deals with the fundamental questions of life and death. The problem is there are too many bad crime stories.
Critics tend to be very hard on the horror genre.
Y.A. wasn't really a specific genre when I was fifteen, but if it was, I would probably have shunned it; I was a huge snob.
I'm not really a zombie genre guy; I'm not particularly versed in it. Doing 'The Walking Dead' sort of turned me on to the whole thing.
I've never been a big horror genre fan, but I did go see 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in the theaters and I dug it. I thought it was cool.
As for genre, my adult books are usually filed under science fiction / fantasy, although some stores put them into romance, and few have stuck them into horror. I consider all my books a mix of steampunk and urban fantasy.
The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age - when you are going through something like that - the genre is so meaningful.
Since my father is a musician as well, he taught me growing up that if you can play jazz, you can learn all instruments and write on them. He wanted me to be a songwriter that can do anything in any genre. I'm all about doing every genre.
'Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.
In 'Windtalkers,' the director John Woo is meticulous in melding his own intimate style into the cliches of a large-scale war movie, paying homage to all the tired conventions of the genre. But it's an honor that these cliches don't deserve.
I've always been into the horror genre, so I've seen a lot of movies with ghosts and supernatural stuff.
I tend to fall more into the fun horror genre than the traumatic horror genre. I love the films where you're laughing as much as screaming, but that doesn't mean I don't like the other ones.
When 'Watchmen' was published in 1986, the vast majority of comics readers deemed it a watershed in comics history. The 12-part serial comic book was widely acclaimed as a genius subversion of the superhero genre, and it did much to popularize comics to adults.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.
I'm a genre writer - I chose to be one, I ended up one, I still am one, and I'm not writing transgressive, genre-blurring fiction. I write 'core SF' - it may occasionally incorporate horror or noir tropes, but it's not pretending to be anything other than what it is.
In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.
If I spent my time wondering about what genre I wanted to be in or where I was on the charts, I wouldn't be able to write these kinds of song. I'd be too busy doing other things.
I'm not as worried about the process of writing, simply because I think I've got that one down, you know? I think I know what brings specificity to these ideas, what brings specificity to the genre elements, or anything else, and it's personal emotions.
I don't look for anything in particular, like a particular genre. It's all very much to do with the quality of the script and the character as well.
For commercial books in a genre, readers' and editors' expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers' guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not).
I had - and continued to have - great fun exploring the Revelation Space universe, but it was always clear to me that I wanted to write other kinds of books, even within what might be termed the fairly narrow overlapping genre categories of hard SF and space opera.