Pastoral Resources

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

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

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.

Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too.

It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.

If you make a movie about Elizabeth I, how much of the dialogue is her real words? Audiences know when they go see a movie that it is fiction.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series also shows the potential of lighter fantastic fiction. I read the first, and listened to a tape of a later one, and it's fun.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

I prefer fact to fiction.