“I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.” ThinkingStoriesTodayInterestingFictionVisionRolesStrangeScience FictionIntenseVersionsVividStrange Stories Author:China Mieville
“The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.” WorldWritingEyeTodayLanguageFictionResponsibilityVisionPovertyRolesAwarenessEarsIncreaseTongueSensesDeprivedPoorestCripples Author:Anais Nin
“It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.” HumansFactsLightPassionEnergyImaginationMemoriesPowerfulExistenceFictionVisionCreativeObjectsMaterialsIdealsRelationObviousIntenseConfusionFancyReachingFedsAssociationInwardRepresentationConstructsInclinationHuman ExistenceHabitualTransientBreadthCreative EnergySusceptibility Author:George Eliot
“I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.” ThinkingWayWritingCharacterFictionVisionEnemyNovelStructureSettingFamiliarSettingsAssumptionThemePlotAbandonedWay Of ThinkingTotalityAll That Remains Book:A John Hawkes symposium: design and debris Source: A John Hawkes symposium: design and debris
“The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.” HumansHas BeensStoriesFictionVisionComfortableWorkersBusyVery GoodAppealsParadiseFlawsFactoriesUtopiaStaticUtopianFactory WorkersTantalizingFatal FlawsFourier Author:Christine Jennings
“The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.” ThinkingShouldAmericaCommunityViewsFictionVisionInternationalArrogantInternational CommunityFuzzyInternationalism Author:Charles Krauthammer