My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel. Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly. Joan Didion
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. Martin Amis
Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end. Italo Calvino
Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end. Italo Calvino
Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases. David Brin
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth. Margaret Atwood
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. Margaret Atwood
Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be - a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they - and all of us - have to be able to think about a world that works differently. Samuel R.Delany
Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction. Poppy Z. Brite
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see. Margaret Atwood
Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years. Jared Diamond
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. Martin Amis
The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I'm talking about myself very directly. Paul Auster
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale. Ralph Ellison
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