Top 1200 Stranger Than Fiction Quotes & Sayings - Page 14

I can think of very few science books I've read that I've called useful. What they've been is wonderful. They've actually made me feel that the world around me is a much fuller, much more wonderful, much more awesome place than I ever realized it was. That has been, for me, the wonder of science. That's why science fiction retains its compelling fascination for people. That's why the move of science fiction into biology is so intriguing. I think that science has got a wonderful story to tell.

I've always believed in the power of rational thinking and behavior as the savior of the world, and science fiction as a powerful medium to encourage that, which explains my signature line, 'Let's save the world through science fiction.'

For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

My life had taken a stranger turn than I could've ever imagined. What was I doing on this path? Where was I headed really? Who was I to take on a battle between powers I didn't understand— armed with a runaway cat, a uniquely bad drummer, a pair of garden shears, and an Ovaltine-drinking teen Galileo? To save a girl who didn't want to be saved?

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.

Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good.

I had never been much of a science-fiction or Buck Rogers fan. I was more interested in what was going on right now than in the centuries to come.

You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.

God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.

Can you lay your life down, so a stranger can live? Can you take what you need, but take less than you give? Could you close every day, without the glory and fame? Could you hold your head high, when no-one knows your name?

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.

The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

If you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9 percent will say that's science fiction. Actually, it's inevitable. It's guaranteed to happen.

Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.

I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today - that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction.

It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

My story starts at sea... a perilous voyage to an unknown land... a shipwreck... The wild waters roar and heave... The brave vessel is dashed all to pieces, and all the helpless souls within her drowned... all save one... a lady... whose soul is greater than the ocean... and her spirit stronger than the sea's embrace... Not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story... for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name will be... Viola.

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

'The Expats' is a thriller, but one that tends more toward general fiction than toward breathless pulp.

Science fiction is not necessarily either fiction or anything to do with science.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.

I've always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I'd probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated for a long while because it's such well-trod ground.

In the century-long history of Chinese science fiction, apocalyptic themes were mostly absent. This was especially true in the period before the 1990s, when Chinese science fiction, isolated from the influence of the West, developed on its own.

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

My feeling is that writing Fantasy should be harder - not easier - than writing any other kind of fiction.

As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction - indeed, it's a key part of a great deal of science fiction.

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

When you play a person who exists in real life, it is different than when you play fiction.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

In times of trial, for inspiration, people want to look to real people rather than to fiction.

Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep.

I realize that, to many readers, Hard Fantasy may seem to be a contradiction in terms. Fantasy, according to most generally recognized definitions, differs from both 'real world' fiction and 'science fiction' in that magic or magical creatures are active elements.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

My documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.

Fiction is most powerful when it contains most truth; and there is little truth we get so true as that which we find in fiction.

I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought 'I can't wait for the future when the special effects are good' to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.

I love the fact that we can't explain coincidences. I think it's like sometimes you walk into a crowded room and you'll see a stranger and you feel as if you know her better than the friends that you came with. And the very fact that you can't explain it is what gives it its power, that it lies in some deeper or mysterious realm, I think.

There's not a day I live that doesn't start with me getting up and first saying, "What can I do for somebody else?" Whether that means sending something to one of my children or picking up the phone and calling a stranger who is in the hospital, I start every day by wanting more for others than I do for myself.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.