Pastoral Resources

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

There's a science fiction project we really want to make, but it's very expensive. Hopefully it will happen.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

I think Douglas was a real one-off. He was so clever and so intelligent and so well read in real science that he could make science fiction work as well as it did. And just such fun to have around, he was just such a lovely man.

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.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

I don't really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.

One of the reasons I did this, because I wasn't really looking for another science fiction film, was that my daughter can see it. She's 9 and it's really a good film for all ages.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.