Quotes About Fiction

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

The competitions between fiction and nonfiction, short and long, electronic and paper, are not battles in which there can be only one victor. After all, we exist in a world where more kinds of writing than ever are greeted with interest and enthusiasm.

Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction - mysteries, fantasy, and adventure - as eccentric or merely antiquarian.

As time goes on, at both DC and Marvel, characters notch up so many victories that we often start to think of them as infallible, which is kind of death for adventure fiction.

As a kid, growing up, as far as I was concerned, I was Luke Skywalker. Any sort of small victory or any adversity I would come up against at school, I was like, 'How would Luke Skywalker deal with this?' Everybody was the Empire; anybody who bullied me at school was the Empire.

There's a sense of fiction in every video game. It creates a world for itself that you want to obey.

I mean, I'm on a comic book. I'm in a video game. This is not real life.

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.

Not everyone reads comics, although most people know the major superheroes, but the majority of people play video games.

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

Pretend you're mine," he urged, his arms closing around her. "Just for a minute. Pretend there's never been anyone but me, that I'm the one you're promised to. Do it for me....I'll never ask again.

Another great start to a new fantastic series

I've committed many despicable acts in my life—and if I enjoyed them enough, I would do them again—but I would never dream of spoiling the ending to a book.

Stories are a little like mind places. You can do whatever you want with them. I want my stories to have happy endings, where nobody hurts anybody. There's enough hard stuff in the real world.

She'd noticed immediately that I understood the lure of a good story. Sometimes a world that doesn't exist is the only escape from the one that does.

Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.

There's always been a need for horror fiction, though--ghost stories have been a staple of every human society since the beginning of recorded literature--and while commercially the field may have its ups and downs, it will never go away. Hell, look at the Bible: gods, devils, ghosts, witches, giants, resurrections. That's one big horror story. And it's the most popular book on the planet.

Shiprock was the merfolk town where Shona used to live.

Stories don't always reflect the world; they make it, too. A book is a world inside the world, and sometimes there are worlds within that.

Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible -- if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.)

Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.