Pastoral Resources

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

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

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

I like going back and writing fiction.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.

I don't think Pulp Fiction is hard to watch at all.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

Science fiction still is an idea genre.

To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.