Visionary Fiction Quotes

Music can make you feel things that aren't yours - sadness, or love, or joy. A good song has a magic to it. It pulls you in and the feelings in the music take over and you become the music, you become the song. ~ Michelle Frost

Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft. ~ Jeffrey Panzer

You are the author of your life. So please don't let anyone including yourself make you think otherwise. If you feel like you don't like how your story goes, just write it differently. You have the tools, the courage, the power…you have it all! ~ Iva Kenaz

If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently... It didn't come by way of illness per se, accident, or dismissal, but by way of sheer self-mutiny. The self I was born to be, decided to hijack the one I had created. ~ Dawn Kohler

Reality, my strange and precious one. Reality is fabric. Fabric is
reality. And your reality here is far easier to live with than where I
was on the other side. So that's why I don't want to go back, and
why you wouldn't like it. ~ Esme Ellis

Visionary Fiction speaks the language of the soul. It offers a vision of humanity as we dream it could be. ~ Jodine Turner

You are the author of your life. If you don't like how it goes, write it differently. ~ Iva Kenaz

What we can imagine we can make real ~ Nadine May

(Of the main character seeing a new world for the first time.) The air was cold but not bitterly so, and it seemed a bit rough at the back of his throat. He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are. His first impression was of a bright, pale world - a watercolour world out of a child's paint-box, a moment later he recognised the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of something like water, which came nearly to his feet. They were on the shore of a lake or river. ~ C.S. Lewis

If we know ourselves, and know our hearts, we're always home, anywhere. ~ Dawn Kohler

The tall monk who came striding down the shadowed monastery corridor was surprisingly young, barely thirty. As he swept past the novices, his dark robe flapping wildly around his legs, they bobbed their heads in fearful deference. ~ Michelle Frost

Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior. ~ Adrienne Maree Brown

The crack in your heart allows light in. ~ GOOD FORTUNE page 238 ~ Leslie Bratspis

["The Devil in the Dark"] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Anyhow, my point is that you know now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication. ~ Ken Andersen

The power of an idea whose time has come is really the power of Spirit at work. Equality for all is how God is, for instance, and we seek to be like God. When enough of us, along with one or two at visionary consciousness, begin to contemplate these in-Spirit ideas, they can't be stopped. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

...I've been ripped off, lied to, slandered, gossiped about slapped, falsely accused, and had my truths not believed. I've had my heart broken, had my pride stomped on, witnessed unforgivable acts, and heard words that hurt so much I withed that they would not replay in my head, but they did. In all these moments--some tear-soaked, some life-defining, but all character-building moments--I have felt vulnerable.
And I believe these feelings of vulnerability--when a person feels scared and alone and overwhelmed and pissed off, wen the sting of unfairness bites deep--while miserable to live through, are the basis for writing compelling fiction. ~ Jessica Page Morrell

I don't really consider my work, on the whole, 'fringe' in my own mind; science fiction and fantasy have been pretty solidly in the mainstream for a while. ~ Jacqueline Carey

As a fiction writer, let me make it up, and let me make it up to you. I'll pen our love story, if you'll be my co-author. ~ Jarod Kintz

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight. ~ Joseph Conrad

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again. ~ Rudy Rucker

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction. ~ David Ignatius

Racial superiority isn't real. It is delusional fiction created by ignorant people. ~ Jonathan Heatt

Who am I to deny gravity, Aurora? When you shine brighter than any constellation in the sky? ~ Jay Kristoff

That she was now more tired and forgetful, while able to do three times what she had been able to do when she was somewhat less tired and forgetful but also stressed, guilty, grouchy, and overwhelmed, seemed a small price to pay. ~ Kamy Wicoff

He slept that night the sleep of a successfully stubborn man. ~ Isaac Asimov

And why is it all men think
everything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain silly
drivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of finding
the perfect love? ~ V.C. Andrews

I started picturing Rens smiling face, the warmth of his touch, the slight curl of his lip before he kissed me. Every happy memory came rushing back through the blackness illuminating it in brilliant color. ~ S.G. Holster

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M.Cain. There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children's books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer's word counter feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet. ~ David Nicholls

Just as political tyrannies censor communications and religious tyrannies condemn fiction, the abuser feels threatened by any reading or daydreaming in which the victim may engage and will oppose these forms of communication with the self just as he moves to isolate the victim from other people. However, for those of us not under 24-hour surveillance, reading work (such as feminist science fiction) that nourishes the imagination and therefore moves us toward change, is possible. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of.
But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice
those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations. ~ Orson Scott Card

My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn't mentioned such an important plot point. ~ Nalo Hopkinson

Vladimir Nabokov
"... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book."
― Vladi ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And thus, lost in her own thoughts,she let Bacchus do whatever he wished & she only sat up when he accidentally pressed too hard on her tender flesh."Oh! Sorry! I was only admiring the beauty of Nature!" Bacchus said when he noticed her grinning at him. "Let me wash myself first,Sir,if you wish to taste my Nectar,"she suggested.[MMT] ~ Nicholas Chong

It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse ~ Nancy B. Brewer

Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called 'heightened interrogation'. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor. ~ Robert Harris

I don't think there's any border between science and art. All the fiction films I have made were always on the same subject, - a discovery of the "Other," an exploration of difference. ~ Jean Rouch

Since the show [Helix] is based in real science, there are real-life epidemic scares out there, throughout history, where there are these huge viruses that have wiped out huge populations. So, we're dealing with something that the CDC hasn't seen before, but it comes from a virus. That's something that's based in reality, and then you put the science fiction on that and it's a really interesting combination. ~ Kyra Zagorsky

All fiction is autobiographical fantasy. ~ James Joyce

Luis found all this very exciting. He had enthusiasm for myths, legends, bad omens, bad weather, supernatural happenings and inexplicable events. His passion for superstitions and doomsaying drove his other family members crazy. He didn't often meet curious strangers with whom he could share his fantastic tales. ~ Zita Steele

That was a lesson everyone (every human?) learned before puberty, not to let reality seem diminished by fiction. As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you. ~ Stephen King

Each time in fiction or in history I meet a well-defined personality I am personally interested in him, for we know each other already, because we met on the river. ~ Mark Twain

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation. ~ Jamais Cascio

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. ~ Philip Roth

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe. ~ Giles Foden

As if somehow irony," she recaps for Maxine, "as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious - weakening its grip on 'reality.' So all kinds of make-believe - forget the delusional state the country's in already - must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now."

"Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school." Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko's Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, "Don't tell Ms. Cheung!"

"You notice," Heidi continues, "how 'reality' programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it's so producers shouldn't have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There's more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they're all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys ~ Leslie Fielder

Besides,love is only a feeling. ~ Christina Westover

This director could say many things about duty, and self-respect, and dignity, but she knew none of these meant much in the post-modern world. ~ B. Barmanbek

Therm-bombs! Drop 'em right on us! I been roasted before - it's nothing! ~ Henry V. O'Neil

Even though we don't admit it, every single one of us aspires to be like somebody, whether they live in the world today, within the bard's lyrics, or on the pages in the Library ~ Evan Meekins

If creative fiction writing is a process of translating an abstraction into the concrete, there are three possible grades of such writing: translating an old (known) abstraction (theme or thesis) through the medium of old fiction means (that is, characters, events or situations used before for that same purpose, that same translation) -- this is most of the popular trash; translating an old abstraction through new, original fiction means -- this is most of the good literature; creating a new, original abstraction and translating it through new, original means. This, as far as I know, is only me -- my kind of fiction writing. ~ Ayn Rand