Science Fiction Writer Quotes

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

Kurt Vonnegut

#2. When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#3. My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.

Daniel Goldstein

#4. Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

Pamela Sargent

#5. ...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...

Stephen King

#6. I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.

Ray Bradbury

#7. I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.

Brian Aldiss

#8. LARRY NIVEN is best known as a science-fiction writer.

Neil Gaiman

#9. Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

Rudy Rucker

#10. I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.

Ray Bradbury

#11. The next time you need a piece of apparently obscure information, try asking a science fiction writer. You might be surprised.

Alastair Reynolds

#12. 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

#13. Some amiably deranged science-fiction writer had come up with it forty years back and, like so many of his kind, given it away for free - or anyway at fifty cents a word.

Larry Niven

#14. It's always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it.

Robin Williams

#15. When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.

Ray Bradbury

#16. I'm tired of being considered a lesbian writer, tired of being a science-fiction writer, tired of being a thriller writer. I'm a writer. Period. Story matters to me.

Nicola Griffith

#17. I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

Ramez Naam

#18. I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.

Kurt Vonnegut

#19. When I was 14, I thought, 'How wonderful to be a science fiction writer. I'd like to do that.' I have never lost touch with that ambitious 14-year-old, and I can't help chuckling and thinking, 'You did it, and you did it right.'

Robert Silverberg

#20. A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.

Adam Roberts

#21. I'm the only member of SFWA in Nebraska, but I don't pine away for the companionship of other science fiction writers. I [go] to very few conventions. I'm quite willing to be that eccentric who has a very odd job, quite happy to be the only science fiction writer in town.

Robert Reed

#22. There must be a dozen films now based on Philip K. Dick novels or stories, far more than any other published science fiction writer. He's sort of become the go-to guy for weird science fiction notions.

John Kessel

#23. I'm not a science fiction writer, I'm a physicist.

Michio Kaku

#24. Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak
human, not the other way around.

Spider Robinson

#25. A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.

Robert J. Sawyer

#26. The writer's special talent is to empathize with people and imagine their lives. We know them as we write them.

Kay Kenyon

#27. Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.

Karl Schroeder

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

Paul Di Filippo

#32. I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

China Mieville

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#36. 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

#37. If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.

Charlie Jane Anders

#38. Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.

Lawrence Wright

#39. As a very young writer - kindergarten through about fifth grade - I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the 'Guinness Book of World Records.'

Tananarive Due

#40. Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

Walter Jon Williams

#41. I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Alan Lightman

#42. Braxton Cosby's stories feel personal and well thought-out. I'm happy to welcome this entertaining writer to the YA science fiction field. I look forward to more of his work!

Tananarive Due

#43. In order to be a better writer, one must always write.

Safa Shaqsy

#44. This is for everyone who has ever looked at the stars, or gazed from atop a hill, or across the sea and wondered ...

Tim Perkins

#45. In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best
science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction
writer.
[dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]

Arthur C. Clarke

#46. Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.

Patricia Briggs

#47. Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved.

Alan Dean Foster

#48. I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.

William Gibson

#49. When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

Jane Lindskold

#50. Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#51. To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.

Alan Joshua

#52. I mean that you and I know that in this universe, God is a hack," he said. "He's a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can't plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?

John Scalzi

#53. I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

Colson Whitehead

#54. I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.

Neil LaBute

#55. All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought.

Paolo Bacigalupi