Famous Quotes & Sayings

Andrew Clements

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

Ridley Scott

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.

Alice McDermott

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Bharati Mukherjee

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

Karin Slaughter

I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.

Martin Villeneuve

'Mars et Avril' is a science fiction film. It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen.

Julia Glass

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

David Guterson

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

Shaun Cassidy

I think it has science-fiction elements, but I would say that overall it's a mystery.

Sarah Dessen

I have a tendency to embellish: I think it's a weakness of fiction writers. Once you know how to make a story better, it's hard not to do it all the time.

Alan Lightman

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Gregory Benford

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Mark Billingham

More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.

Elizabeth Bowen

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Elizabeth Bowen

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Elizabeth McCracken

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Brit Marling

Because we're watching so many movies and are consumed by so many stories, science fiction lets you do something a bit fresh and that hasn't been seen before.

Brian Michael Bendis

Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.

Ben Marcus

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

Denis Diderot

How easy it is to tell tales!

Mae Jemison

I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate - it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.

Lisa McMann

I've always found teenagers really interesting. I think they've got so much going on in their lives, so that lends itself really well to fiction because there's so much drama, so much activity, so much growth.

William Gibson

I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.

Christian McKay

It's more difficult playing a real-life person than a fictional character - you can go easy on yourself with a fictional character.

Sue Monk Kidd

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

Warren Ellis

If you write any kind of fiction about America, you immediately have to start doing some research about guns, so in some ways, 'Gun Machine' is just the culmination of 20 years of reading about guns.

Alexander Smith

An old novel has a history of its own.

Ranbir Kapoor

I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life.

Allan Gurganus

When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.

I think most fiction focuses on uncomfortable settings because that's interesting.

Philip Dick

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Cynthia Ozick

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.