There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.
All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.
In every other science fiction series, humans are at the top of the food chain. In the 'Babylon 5' universe, they're in the bottom third.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.
Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.
I can find my biography in every fable that I read.
I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story.
In fiction, the actions of a villain, even when unspeakable, can be cathartic to read about. They let us experience darkness, but add a safe remove.
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.
It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.
My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
Science Fiction is a branch of children's literature.
In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it's seen as mere science fiction. It's cold, hard, metallic reality.
I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.