Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

I love writing romance, along with science fiction and fantasy - and my books usually meld all three to some degree.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Fantasy and science fiction are where my brain lives.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

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.

Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.

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.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

I don't look at stories in genres. A good story is a good story, no matter what planet it happens on, whether the characters are mice or human or whatever. That's how I look at it.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'