Top 100 Quotes About Science Fiction
#1. We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.
Kevin J. Anderson
#2. By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
Alvin Toffler
#3. I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
Rainn Wilson
#4. At one of the first science fiction conventions I ever went to, I saw a guy wearing a sandwich board promoting his book. Count me out of that one.
Carol Berg
#5. If quantum mechanics is how reality structures itself, then the world is far weirder than we think. It is truly a wonderful time to write Science Fiction!
Stavros Halvatzis
#6. When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
William Gibson
#7. I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens.
Gustavo Perez Firmat
#8. I started the movement of SF in America in 1908 through my first magazine, 'MODERN ELECTRICS.' At that time it was an experiment. Science fiction authors were scarce. There were not a dozen worth mentioning in the entire world
Hugo Gernsback
#9. Class I to XII wasn't much help; I was always a mediocre student. But when I pursued higher education and studied economics with theatre or psychology with science fiction, I got a whole new world view.
Vir Das
#10. The genre of science fiction is a fun house, an amusement park ride, but it's also a problem. The question that's always being indirectly asked is this: 'Just who do we think we are and, further, who do we want to be?'
Douglas Lain
#11. Science fiction is the fantasy that science always works.
Dexter Palmer
#12. As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies.
Gary Wolf
#13. Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#14. I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
William Gibson
#15. A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
Frederik Pohl
#16. It really wasn't my thing. It still isn't my thing, the whole science-fiction action thing. I prefer simpler, character-based movies.
Natalie Portman
#17. I like science fiction. I took all the accelerated classes in school. I'm kind of a dork.
Anson Mount
#18. With science fiction there's endless possibilities.
Anna Torv
#19. If you can read the book and say, 'Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!' That's Military Science Fiction." (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)
Brandon Sanderson
#20. I've started a company, called Tall Girl Productions, and we've got our first project that is purely producing, not writing, with a writer named Evan Daugherty. It's for NBC, it's called 'Afterthought,' and it's science fiction-ish. That's fun.
Melissa Rosenberg
#22. And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.
Berenice Marlohe
#23. It's horrid to be called a Shakespearean actor because that's incredibly limiting, and we love acting. We like telling stories; anything that excites us we want to be a part of. Science fiction is fun, too!
Timothy Dalton
#24. I think what I love about science fiction and what sci-fi can be really good at is obviously you're working with outlandish concepts that have very little to do with the real world, like time travel for instance.
Rian Johnson
#25. There were probably, what, 300 science-fiction members in the SFWA, of whom probably a hundred were active members in the sense that they were selling something every year, or every couple years.
Jerry Pournelle
#26. The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
Sheri S. Tepper
#27. I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate - it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.
Mae Jemison
#29. Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.
Jean M. Auel
#30. When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.
William Gibson
#31. A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
Neil Gaiman
#32. 'Blade Runner' was one of several dystopian science-fiction films to tank in the early and middle '80s. 'Tron,' 'The Dark Crystal,' 'The Keep,' 'Labyrinth': none found a large audience.
Richard Corliss
#33. Hopefully, great science fiction films help you think about issues that relate to yourself, whether it's: What's my purpose? Why am I here? What is it that makes me who I am? Those are the kind of questions my favorite science fiction films ask.
Joseph Kosinski
#34. It looked to her like an image out of a Steven Spielberg science fiction movie.
Stephen King
#35. I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
A.E. Van Vogt
#36. I loved reading all kinds of books, but I particularly loved books like 'Red Planet' by Robert Heinlein, which very few people read anymore but is a wonderful science fiction story.
Rebecca Stead
#37. The one by L. Ron Hubbard ... I'm not in favor of his religion by any means, but he wrote a book called Battlefield Earth that was a very fun science fiction book.
Mitt Romney
#38. As for genre, my adult books are usually filed under science fiction / fantasy, although some stores put them into romance, and few have stuck them into horror. I consider all my books a mix of steampunk and urban fantasy.
Gail Carriger
#39. I think there's always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells' stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.
Alan Moore
#40. As a kid, I went from reading kids' books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.
John Allison
#42. I've always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I'd probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated for a long while because it's such well-trod ground.
Rick Yancey
#43. When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.
Steven Wright
#44. The Sword the burning decieved rising the science fiction the betrayed the spy the souls
Moira Young
#45. I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don't like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn't interest me because I'm not learning anything about something I'll actually have to deal with.
James D. Watson
#46. Fantasy deals with the immeasurable while science-fiction deals with the measurable.
Walter Wangerin
#47. It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science
it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong, joked Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and the former president of the Royal Society, at Wired 2013.
Martin J. Rees
#48. I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.
William Hurt
#49. Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
Freeman Dyson
#50. Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.
David G. Hartwell
#51. Science fiction is always about the time it's written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction. I
Warren Ellis
#52. Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
David Brin
#53. Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don't bother to read.
Joss Whedon
#54. I don't really consider my work, on the whole, 'fringe' in my own mind; science fiction and fantasy have been pretty solidly in the mainstream for a while.
Jacqueline Carey
#55. I am playing in a playground that's already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.
Alastair Reynolds
#56. Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.
Salman Rushdie
#57. In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.
Berenice Bejo
#58. Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.
Ken Liu
#59. I was obsessed with movies when I was younger. During the summer, I would go by myself to a theater down the street from my house. I saw every comedy or science fiction movie that came out. My kids love going to the movies, but 3D scares them.
Allen Covert
#60. I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.
William Gibson
#61. The next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.
Alastair Reynolds
#62. When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.
James Altucher
#63. The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.
Thomas Mallon
#64. 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.
Michael Shanks
#65. Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
William Gibson
#66. Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.
Ray Bradbury
#67. Think of it. Going to sleep and waking up later in a science fiction future. It'll be fantastic. The shock and the wonder of it.
Dexter Palmer
#68. My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
Elizabeth Moon
#69. We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their catch because somebody gave money to a politician.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#70. To me, it's science fiction for me to do the things I've been blessed to do in this industry.
Will Smith
#71. I'm a science fiction author at heart, and what I like about the Cthulhu Mythos setting is that, at its core, it is horror science fiction. I can take ideas from modern theoretical science, manipulate them in truly bizarre and weird ways, and remain true to the Cthulhu Mythos vision.
David Conyers
#72. We physicists don't like to admit it, but some of us are closet science fiction fans. We hate to admit it because it sounds undignified. But when we were children, that's when we got interested in science, for a lot of us.
Michio Kaku
#73. 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.
Moon Bloodgood
#74. Science fiction is where I started out, really. When I was a kid, I was a complete addict of science fiction. It was one of my earliest interests as a writer, and I've just taken a long time to circle back around to it.
Salman Rushdie
#75. Because we're watching so many movies and are consumed by so many stories, science fiction lets you do something a bit fresh and that hasn't been seen before.
Brit Marling
#76. 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 payoff and execution.
Josh Trank
#77. Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam ... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases.
David Brin
#78. Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.
Rudy Rucker
#79. The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races.
A.E. Samaan
#80. I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I've been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I'm very well-versed in science fact and science fiction.
Jack Kirby
#81. Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
Karen Joy Fowler
#82. There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases: What if . . . ? If only . . . If this goes on
Ray Bradbury
#83. Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable - and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.
Samuel R. Delany
#84. A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.
Jamais Cascio
#85. First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Clive James
#86. There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
Elizabeth Moon
#87. One of the reasons I did this, because I wasn't really looking for another science fiction film, was that my daughter can see it. She's 9 and it's really a good film for all ages.
Sigourney Weaver
#88. The whole point of science fiction is that you explore the effect of ideas on a society.
Peter F. Hamilton
#89. Since I was really little, I've just always had an obsession with, not just science fiction, but science and space. And also because as time passes and the more advanced science becomes, the more interesting it becomes.
Moby
#90. Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, 'Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.'
David Gerrold
#91. Real science can be far stranger than science fiction and much more satisfying.
Stephen Hawking
#92. For me, a kitchen is like science fiction. I only go there to open the refrigerator and take something out.
Ann-Margret
#93. I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.
Robert Silverberg
#94. With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.
Kingsley Amis
#95. A lot of the futuristic space stuff seemed to me to be a very cool form of science-fiction, so that was my first real baptism in the genre.
J. Michael Straczynski
#96. So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.
Robert Sheckley
#97. A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.
Frederik Pohl
#98. There's a lot of crap out there. Most of the science fiction films alone are abominations, you know. They're mindless. So you can't learn from those kinds of films.
Ray Bradbury
#99. The concept of the robot encapsulates both aspects of technology. On one hand it's cool, it's fun, it's healthy, it's sexy, it's stylish. On the other hand it's terrifying, it's alienating, it's addictive, and it's scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature.
Thomas Bangalter
#100. I think a lot of people have an idea of virtual reality from science fiction, books and movies that have been out over the last couple of decades.
Brendan Iribe
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
