Norman Spinrad Famous Quotes
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[SF] was a commercial genre born in the old adventure pulp magazines
of the first third of the twentieth century, aimed primarily at
adolescent males, which, over the decades, in fits and starts,
evolved into an intellectually credible, scientifically germane,
transcendental literature without losing its popular base.
Of what other literature in the history of the western world can
this truly be said?
Kiss me, and you'll live forever. You'll be a frog, but you'll live forever.
If it's not American, the French won't go see it.
English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.
The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.
In America, if you don't do a 100 million dollars, you've done nothing.
The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out, and nobody wants to buy.
I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.
There are certain things that ordinary people have that celebrities don't have.
When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money.
Therefore, since I could count on no continuity of sapient will to carry me through, indeed since all that was certain was that I must suffer repeated loss of same in order to maintain my body's vitality, my only course was to accomplish with what I hoped was the greater puissance of conscious craft what I had already once barely managed to achieve by accident of fate.
Which was to use these periods of conscious lucidity to engrave a mantric tropism upon the presentient levels of my mind with perpetual chanting repetition and diligent meditation, so that even when reason and conscious will had once more fled, my Bloomenkind self would, during periods of enforced floral nirvana, be programmed to follow the yellow, to follow the sun that sooner or later must rise during a cycle of such meditations into its percept sphere.
"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ...
Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited?
Norman Spinrad: I think it's a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov's, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn't. The supposed dichotomy between "literary fiction" and "popular fiction" is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn't want to be "popular," meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were "serious"?
I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. "Genre," if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. "Westerns" must be set in the Old West. "Mysteries" must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. "Nurse Novels" must have a nurse. And so forth.
In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are "genres." They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of "genre" in an absolute literary sense.
If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.
For Feric Jaggar is essentially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior. He would be able to manipulate the surface of social reality by projecting his own pathologies upon it, but he would never be able to share in the inner communion of interpersonal relationships. Such a creature could give a nation the iron leadership and sense of certainty to face a mortal crisis, but at what cost? Led by the likes of a Feric Jaggar, we might gain the world at the cost of our souls. No,
The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.
I believe that interest in heroes is universal and eternal.
[P]ower, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.
Chaos is the enemy of Order but the enemy of Chaos is also the enemy of Order
I never learned to read music.
America was becoming the world's best-defended Third World country, and the best and the brightest were collaborating in the process.
I was a precocious reader.
It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.
I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.
I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless.