Quotes About Fiction

Every television show is hard to do, but when you're in genre and you're recreating worlds and mythologies, they're particularly hard.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

I really am so grateful to get to do what it is I love - build worlds. Most of my job is playing make-believe, getting to know the people in my head, and letting them help me tell their stories.

When I watch a movie, I want to be taken away into worlds that are beyond my imagination.

Writers of all things speculative have played in alternate and parallel worlds for a long time - everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee - and it's an obsession that likely isn't going away any time soon.

I started reading and fell in love with the worlds and characters Lev Grossman created. I'm taken with his exploration of an idealized childhood fantasy through the lens of adulthood, or coming into adulthood.

Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don't exist.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

I'm not so worried about super-intelligence and 'Terminator' scenarios. Frankly I think those are quite farfetched.

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.

I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics.

I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.

Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.

A duped newspaper or magazine could contend that a fiction-spouting journalist obtained part of his salary via fraud, and use a criminal proceeding to try and recoup that money. Given the profession's notoriously low wages, however, it's probably not worth the publicity headache and legal fees. No news organization has ever pursued such a case.

Like my fictional protagonist Tom Thorne, I love country. My tastes go back a bit further than his do, and I still listen to stuff from the late '70s and early '80s.

If Tom Clancy didn't write any Op-Centers, he would be $60 million less rich.

If you have an extreme character, you need normal characters to contrast them. Sherlock Holmes certainly needed a Dr. Watson. And Pippi Longstocking, who supposedly inspired Lisbeth Salander, needed Tommy and Annika, the normal middle-class neighbors.

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.

From a gameplay standpoint, I've said for years that hero, fiction, and tone have nothing to do with the idea that choices have consequences. And that's really what I'm interested in. I care about you showing how clever and creative you are.

'Seize the Story' takes readers all the way through the process of writing fiction, from beginning to end. Every element, from dialogue to setting, plotting to character creation, is laid out and illustrated with examples. But the tone of the book is not that of a dry writing manual - it's definitely written for teenagers.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.