Science Fiction Writers Quotes

#1. The term sci-fi, which most science fiction writers loathe, I will reserve for those motion pictures that claim to be science fiction but are actually based on comic strips. Or worse.

Ben Bova

#2. 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.

Ann Leckie

#3. Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that's because we're all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#4. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Charles Stross

#5. Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn't mention it.

Stanislaw Lem

#6. Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers.

Glenn Greenwald

#7. Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

Michio Kaku

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

Robert Silverberg

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

Vernor Vinge

#10. 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

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

Sheri S. Tepper

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

Isaac Asimov

#13. Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.

Gloria Steinem

#14. 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.

Jerry Pournelle

#15. It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

Terry Pratchett

#16. 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.

Philip K. Dick

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

William Gibson

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

Rudy Rucker

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

Jack McDevitt

#20. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.

Kurt Vonnegut

#21. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

Bruce Sterling

#22. Like most science-fiction writers, he knew almost nothing about science.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#23. Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details.

Kurt Vonnegut

#24. Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

Martin Rees

#25. 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

#26. Bradbury would have said his plots are myths and metaphors that tell stories about the human condition. That's what sets him apart from other science-fiction writers: He doesn't write about technology, but about the human heart and psyche.

Sam Weller

#27. Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you.

John Scalzi

#28. 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.

Gregory Benford

#29. Despite what your science fiction writers dream, we simply don't have the technology

Stephenie Meyer

#30. 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.

Tahmoh Penikett

#31. Without the dreamers who write science fiction and other imaginary material we'd still be sitting in caves ... if we weren't already extinct.

William C. Samples

#32. Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

Pamela Sargent

#33. Even when I'm writing about shape shifters and magical lands, I'm looking into my own heart.

Kay Kenyon

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

Kay Kenyon

#35. (Writers of Earth-invader science fiction, please remember to provide all your aliens with soft grasping hands or tentacles or some other fleshy fat appendages.)

Edward O. Wilson

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

Alastair Reynolds

#37. Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#38. 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

#39. There's always been a little bit of tension between the writers of science fiction literature and then science-fiction televised shows or movies, partly because they have a different dynamic.

John Scalzi

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

Kathy Reichs

#41. I never had a favourite book! I liked all kinds of things - science fiction, so I read Heinlen and Ray Bradbury, and I also liked reading about kids like myself, so I read Judy Blume and Norma Klein and Paula Danzinger and a lot of other writers. I also read James Herriot!

Rebecca Stead

#42. When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now
where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

Doris Lessing

#43. The male author unthinkingly creates a world in which every single member of society is male except - hey presto! - when the protagonist feels like getting laid. Especially common in science fiction; apparently many writers assume that in the future women will die out.

Howard Mittelmark

#44. Science fiction is the only genre that enables African writers to envision a future from our African perspective.

Nnedi Okorafor

#45. Philadelphia's a good science-fiction town. There are many professional writers here, like Michael Swanwick, Tom Purdom, Gregory Frost, Victoria McManus and others. There are professional artists such as Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger and Susan McAninley.

Gardner Dozois

#46. 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

#47. All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

Alan Lightman

#48. 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.

Tim O'Brien

#49. The 1970s were so wonderful for women writers. There were all these women, and they were seen as doing the most interesting, innovative and exciting stuff in science fiction. I was inspired by that.

Lisa Tuttle

#50. Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.

John Clute

#51. Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

Ann Leckie

#52. I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world.

Kay Kenyon

#53. A novel in progress doesn't have a clear, forward process. It's messy, like a beloved, balky child.

Kay Kenyon

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

Kurt Vonnegut

#55. [Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

Terry Pratchett

#56. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut