Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in...
All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside hi...
Different narrative forms naturally lend themselves to different aspects of existence. The novel is ideal for presenting the inner lives of its characters, the play is ideal for showing people in a ro...
Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception.
He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insul...
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life ge...
[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, What are my big scenes? and then get every drop of juice out of them.
Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it mo...
The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what'...
When you've got creative momentum, the last thing you want to do is stop. I'd write and write and wake up with my head slumped over and my fingers still on the keyboard and the last sentence trailing...
Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.
The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book se...
It's easy to want to be an author. You see it in your mind with sun streaming through windows and a Siamese cat purring on an antique rug and a little pellet stove and somehow the bills are paid and t...
There's a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don't lead a story. You follow it.
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.