Top 1200 Speculative Fiction Quotes & Sayings

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

No nation can say, 'We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate - to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one' - no nation can do that.

The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn't conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that's going to save the world, so there's a different tone that comes out in the way speculative fiction is done. That's refreshing to read.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

Anchors aren't just creating fiction; they're becoming characters in the fiction they themselves create. In the world of TV channels, facts are presented like fiction, so governments aren't inconvenienced; fiction is presented like fact, so governments stay happy.

Speculative fiction is where my heart lies. It's what I read growing up, and it's what I read as an adult.

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

Scottish operative lodges began in the seventeenth century to admit non-operative members as accepted or gentleman masons and that by the early eighteenth century in some lodges the accepted or gentleman masons had gained the ascendancy: those lodges became, in turn speculative lodges, whilst others continued their purely operative nature. The speculative lodges eventually combined to form the Grand Lodge of Scotland in 1736.

Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years, including recurrent speculative episodes. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we're now having another one of those speculative episodes.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.

Sci-fi is speculative fiction. 'Field of Dreams' is sci-fi.

One of my central approaches to writing speculative fiction is to take an absurd situation, which we presently feel is normal, and then push it to an even further absurdity. It's only in this light that we can see the reflection of the disturbing state of our present-day affairs.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's fiction. It's not meant to be a textbook. I don't believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That's a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they're doing is supposed to be art.

War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

Until you separate the speculative behaviour of the financial sector from the real economy and the financing of the real economy, then we are not going to see the kind of stability or the capacity to drive genuine, income-led growth as opposed to debt-fuelled, speculative behaviour.

For me, fantasy and speculative science fiction are the genres that feel closest to how I feel about being alive. Like, when I feel the most invigorated by just even a walk down the block in twilight, when the street lamps are just coming on and there's mist and some shadowy thing in silhouette in a window, I naturally invest all of those things with deep mythology and mystery and meaning. I think I need to believe in that version of reality because I get very scared when I don't.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

I used to write fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction and have a clear pattern because I'd need a break from one style when going into the next book.

Sometimes when we label something dystopian fiction, I feel like we're trying very hard not to use the words 'science fiction,' because science fiction has those horrible connotations of rocket ships and bodacious babes.

Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

I've always believed that a speculative bubble need not lead to a recession, as long as interest rates are cut quickly enough to stimulate alternative investments. But I had to face the fact that speculative bubbles usually are followed by recessions. My excuse has been that this was because the policy makers moved too slowly - that central banks were typically too slow to cut interest rates in the face of a burst bubble, giving the downturn time to build up a lot of momentum.

I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

I prefer non-fiction to fiction. In fact, I don't read fiction at all. I read books that are based on true events.

I don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

Theologians have felt no hesitation in founding a system of speculative thought on the teachings of Jesus; and yet Jesus was never an inhabitant of the realm of speculative thought.

Science fiction is a weird category, because it's the only area of fiction I can think of where the story is not of primary importance. Science fiction tends to be more about the science, or the invention of the fantasy world, or the political allegory. When I left science fiction, I said "They're more interested in planets, and I'm interested in people."

I had decided after 'Hollow Man' to stay away from science fiction. I felt I had done so much science fiction. Four of the six movies I made in Hollywood are science-fiction oriented, and even 'Basic Instinct' is kind of science fiction.

The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.

We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.

The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

Because of the 'Twilight' series, our company gets every speculative piece of fiction from people hoping for the next 'Twilight,' and so you read them, and they all kind of wash over you after awhile.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

The best thing about writing speculative fiction is the opportunity to satirize the whole wide world. The America in 'A Better World' isn't ours, but it's pretty close, so I could lampoon everything from partisan politics to the cult of celebrity to our general disaffection. To me, all that is the point.

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.