Science Fiction Writing Quotes

#1. If you can read the book and say, 'Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!' That's Military Science Fiction." (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)

Brandon Sanderson

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

Geoff Ryman

#6. There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

Andy Weir

#7. The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

Aleksandar Hemon

#8. Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships ...

Margaret Atwood

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

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. If we accept the premise that we're always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses ... and tell a good story.

James S.A. Corey

#13. A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Frederik Pohl

#14. When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

Vernor Vinge

#15. If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.

Tad Williams

#16. If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick...

Barry James Hickey

#17. I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.

David S.Goyer

#18. That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

Paul Di Filippo

#19. I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.

Ted Chiang

#20. The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.

Paul Di Filippo

#21. Rod Clark has one of the most unique voices I have ever encountered. I still quote some of his political insights years later. To have him write political science fiction is both appropriate and intriguing.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

#22. Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.

Isaac Asimov

#23. I've always thought that science and fiction writing have a lot in common because they're both about modeling reality.

Scott Westerfeld

#24. It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

Cory Doctorow

#25. I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#26. 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

#27. [A] science fiction story is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact, experienced.

Edmund Crispin

#28. ...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

#29. Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction.

Damon Knight

#30. When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

Michael Chabon

#31. I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.

Ray Bradbury

#32. Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.

Bruce Sterling

#33. I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

William Monahan

#34. It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

Daniel Keys Moran

#35. A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

Pamela Sargent

#36. I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.

Gene Wolfe

#37. I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.

Porochista Khakpour

#38. To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

John Scalzi

#39. I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.

Chris Dee

#40. I imagined a time when being gay is as unquestioned and un-judged as is having blue eyes. Some might call it fantasy or science fiction. I'd like to think it's the future.

Missouri Vaun

#41. Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

George R R Martin

#42. 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

#43. No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

Octavia Butler

#44. Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

Anthony Burgess

#45. As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.

Daniel H. Wilson

#46. I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.

Sarah Zettel

#47. 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

#48. Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

Octavia E. Butler

#49. May it be written. May it be done.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

#50. I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.

Nigel Kneale

#51. When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.

Ted Chiang

#52. The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!

John Gaver

#53. While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

Laurence Yep

#54. 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

#55. Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction! You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion!

L. Ron Hubbard

#56. 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

#57. For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction.

James Patrick Kelly

#58. My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.

Michael Scott

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

Kay Kenyon

#60. Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

Dan Brown

#61. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.

Irvine Welsh

#62. Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.

Ian Hickson

#63. I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.

Neil Gaiman

#64. [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

#65. Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

Paul Di Filippo

#66. 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

#67. I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

James Rollins

#68. When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.

Adrian Tomine

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

Kay Kenyon

#70. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

Michael Chabon

#71. I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Octavia Butler

#72. You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.

L. Ron Hubbard

#73. As a woman writing SF, I felt I had to think and write like a man in order to be taken seriously.

Heidi Ruby Miller

#74. Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.

A.E. Van Vogt

#75. I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others.

Eric Diehl

#76. I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books.

T.S. Wieland

#77. I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

Roger Zelazny

#78. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Jon Spaihts

#79. Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

Ted Chiang

#80. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay

Ursula K. Le Guin

#81. I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

Octavia E. Butler

#82. If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.

Jane Espenson

#83. Daniel, I was asked of a budding author, how do you know if your story is on track? My answer: I start by knowing my intention, my target. Then, with purpose, I write the scene that unfolds before me, as faithfully as is human. - Daniel LaMonte

Daniel LaMonte

#84. In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

Ben Bova

#85. Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#86. A moment later the scowling face of Admiral Jellico appeared on the screen. He looked as ill-humored as ever. Privately, Calhoun felt that somebody should send an away team into Jellico's ass, to determine just what had crawled up there and died years ago.

Peter David

#87. I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.

Laurell K. Hamilton