As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.

Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.

Many fiction writers who put the science in dont get it right.

Many fiction writers who put the science in don't get it right.

I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.

Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.

I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I'm envious of the level of attention they generate.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.

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

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers.

New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.

I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.

That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.

Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.

The '70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.

It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

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.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.

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