Pastoral Resources

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.

A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.

In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.

I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.