A Quote by David Brin

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

David Brin

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Authors Best Better Could Differential Doubt English English Major Equation Fiction Helps Lives Majors Many No Doubt Parse Save Science Science Fiction Scientific Several Training Very Were Write

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David Brin
American - Author
Born: October 6, 1950

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.

Richard Dawkins

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut

Science fiction is fantasy about issues of science. Science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy predated it by several millennia. The '30s to the '50s were the golden age of science fiction - this was because, to a large degree, it was at this point that technology and science had exposed its potential without revealing the limitations.

Raymond E. Feist

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Alan Turing

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

Gao Xingjian

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.

Frederik Pohl

There was - there still is - a big shortage of good Chinese-English literary translators. So for two years in London, I was stuck waiting, not writing, with several Chinese books I couldn't get translated. That's when I decided to write in English, since I had been living here and had decided to reconstruct my life here. Even if I wrote in broken English, it was better than getting bored and weary and bitter on the long queue of authors waiting to be translated by a stranger.

Xiaolu Guo

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.

Lois Lowry

I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.

Francis Ford Coppola

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.

Clifford Truesdell

So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.

Michio Kaku

To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most - that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a - placid, peaceful one.

Arthur C. Clarke

Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.

James Cameron

I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.

Ray Bradbury

Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.

Ken Liu

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Isabel Allende

A Quote by David Brin

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