Pastoral Resources

Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.

It's not highly intellectual material. I'm dedicating it to the pulp fiction of the past.

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

People who love science fiction really do love sex.

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.

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.

Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.

I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

I get offered a lot of science fiction work and there is a new project in the pipeline called Master Race, set in World War II, but that's a little way off yet.

I would like to do a science fiction film some day. Star Wars seems really to have destroyed the genre, which at one time offered great musical opportunities.

I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing.

Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.