I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
A. B. Yehoshua
The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
A. C. Benson
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
A. E. van Vogt
You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
A. S. Byatt
There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.
A. Scott Berg
It's great to be able to work on some science fiction. I love the genre.
Aaron Stanford
'Pulp Fiction' was probably one of the first films I ever saw that really kind of took effect on me. I was about four years old - obviously wasn't supposed to be seeing that film; my sister kind of sneaked it out and we got to see it. She's older than me. That was something I always used to watch.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson
I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.
Abi Morgan
Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.
Abraham Verghese
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
Adam Christopher
'Doctor Who' is where my love of science fiction and fantasy started. I was introduced to it when I was 8, and I'm still an avid viewer.
My own writing has perhaps more of an American flavor than a British one, but that's because the stories I've so far written have needed it. 'Empire State,' 'Seven Wonders' and 'The Age Atomic' are all very place-centric, where the setting itself is almost a character. But there is a universality to story that isn't just limited to science fiction.
I don't know how it is for people who write fiction or literature, but for me, when I'm writing music, especially with this album, I felt compelled to hold up my end of the conversation. I want people to connect deeper with it.
Adam Granduciel
In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.
Adam Johnson
It's Will Ferrell, he does Will Ferrell movies. But if you really look at it, he tries to do something different with each one, whether it's an action cop movie like 'The Other Guys' or doing 'Talladega Nights' going into red state America or 'Casa de Mi Padre' or 'Stranger Than Fiction,' which is more of a drama.
Adam McKay
So my character on 'Tyrant' is a chap called Barry Al Fayeed, and he is the second son of a fictional Middle Eastern dictator. But, he has grown up since he was young in America. He's trained as a doctor. He's married a beautiful American girl, had two kids, so he's very much an American.
Adam Rayner
Personally, I read fiction, in part, because I get to spend time with people who aren't my people.
Adam Ross
I'm definitely of the 'Harry Potter'-transfigured-me-into-a-reader-and-writer generation. And that's really all I read throughout my teen years, because I really devoted all my time to writing and reading friends' fan-fiction.
Adam Silvera
I haven't written adult fiction, but I do not sugarcoat grief - or what I expect grief to be.
Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.
The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards, and if you think about it, it's the only one that's given for an entire continent.
With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way.
Most of my work - including everything from my own comics to the covers I've drawn for 'The New Yorker' - is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree.
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.
I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.
I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.
For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.
I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don't tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards.
I know how to write fiction well.
I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.
I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
I think the type of actor I am, I tend to play strong leading female characters. The shows I've been on happen to be science fiction genre.
I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like that's because technology has caught up with us.
I used to read science fiction a lot, and I still like science fiction when it is a model of how we really are and to see ourselves from another perspective.
I had to jump around in the arts for a while just to survive. I earned a little money here and there, playing the guitar at union meetings, functions. I sold some science-fiction stories. I knew there was absolutely no question of me not being connected with the arts, but I couldn't find any acting jobs.
NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it's done well, it's not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, '2001,' for example, or the first 'Matrix.' But it takes someone who's got a brain and thinks in order to do really good science fiction.
It was hard for me to believe. I would look down and say, 'This is the moon, this is the moon,' and I would look up and say, 'That's the Earth, that's the Earth,' in my head. So, it was science fiction to us even as we were doing it.
In 'Shadow Tag,' Erdrich creates scenes from a fictional marriage, that of two American Indians, Irene and her painter husband Gil, that suggest some of the worst psychological torments and stresses of real life.
We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.
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.
If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.
'The Levanter' features some of the strongest action scenes to be found in Ambler - who can, in some of his fiction, stay in one place for a whole novel.
I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.
Le Carre's voice - patrician, cold, brilliant and amused - was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War, and George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.
When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time.
