Quotes About Fiction

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.

Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.

Gentleman: An imaginary creature found in Jane Austen novels.

Stanley Kubrick's '2001' was the door that opened up the possibility of science fiction for me. Everything else up to then was fine, but didn't quite work for me.

The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale.

I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960.

I wrote and drew my own books on notebook paper, and I'd staple 'em together. I had my own fictional company, and we had our own thinly veiled offshoots of whatever was popular at Marvel and DC at the time.

Between the ages of 8 and 12, all I wanted to read were 'Star Wars' books.

Science fiction has been an inspiration to generations of scientists and engineers, and the film series 'Star Wars' is no exception.

I think what Stargate has going for it is a sense of humor about their science fiction.

'Stargate' was more a fantasy.

The first book I really loved was 'Little Women' - I'd have given anything for Beth to have been allowed to live; I remember crying very much over her death, trying to make the words change just by staring at them. I loved 'Anne of Green Gables,' too; 'What Katy Did;' and 'Peter Pan.'

Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.

I am not a Starfleet commander, or T.J. Hooker. I don't live on Starship NCC-1701, or own a phaser. And I don't know anybody named Bones, Sulu, or Spock.

As soon as I started reading, I found myself drawn to fictional character's homes as much as I was to the characters themselves.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

There starts to be an overlap between you and the character.

All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.

I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.

I'll say, what makes me happy about making movies is, every once in a while through movies we find a kind of honesty. There's an honesty in fiction that's as effective or even more powerful than the honesty of our lives. We can find something that's genuinely true, like a chemistry between people or a statement that speaks to an audience.

My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.

The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'