Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.
The aliens coming and wiping our electricity and having technical power over us... we don't know what's out there. It something that seems so fictional, but it's something that's possible.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
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 believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.
I vividly remember my first 'Superman' comic, which my granddad bought me when I was about 7. From that point on, all I wanted to do is draw comics. And specifically, superhero and science fiction comics. Basically I used to copy comic books, and dra...
I feel like science fiction can get a bad rap sometimes because people make something just to throw an alien in it or just to make it weird, and it doesn't really have a story.
Star Trek wouldn't die. There were a whole lot of young people who were touched by the thought process of science fiction. If you watched a cop show, there wasn't anything that was going to stimulate your mind.
I didn't read comic books, growing up. I was more of a science fiction/fantasy novel guy. I loved reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Tarzan' and that kind of stuff.
I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.
Science Fiction will never run out of things to wonder about until the human race ceases to use its brain.
In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payof...
I would much rather watch a horror film or science fiction than a comedy. I don't know why. I just like them. I find them relaxing.
You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.
In the meantime, I just have to create those realistic goals about the fact that I don't have a ton of options as an actor who's been on a science fiction show for 8 years.
