Fiction

(34 votes)   The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Salman Rushdie
1948-, Indian-born British Author

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(165 votes)   When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.

James Joyce
1882-1941, Irish Author

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(143 votes)   Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. ''And what are you reading, Miss -- -?'' ''Oh! it is only a novel!'' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ''It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ''; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Jane Austen
1775-1817, British Novelist

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(128 votes)   I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ''Science Fiction'' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
1922-, American Novelist

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(127 votes)   For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.

W. Somerset Maugham
1874-1965, British Novelist, Playwright

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(121 votes)   The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.

Daniel J. Boorstin
1914-, American Historian

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(108 votes)   Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

Robert Browning
1812-1889, British Poet

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(100 votes)   No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Mario Vargas Llosa
1936-, Latin American Author

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(97 votes)   In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

Barbara Ehrenreich
1941-, American Author, Columnist

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(97 votes)   What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
1929-, American Author

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(93 votes)   The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(92 votes)   I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

George Eliot
1819-1880, British Novelist

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(92 votes)   If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

Ursula K. Le Guin
1929-, American Author

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(90 votes)   Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Philip K. Dick
1928-1982, American Science Fiction Writer

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(74 votes)   We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

J. G. Ballard
1930-, British Author

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