Stanley Schmidt Quotes

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

Never say never. I myself say no to things, and then I wear them. So, I'm now kind of sticking to the rule that there are no rules. Everything eventually comes back.

Trends have come and gone and they're coming back my way so I'm super excited about that.

I've lived long enough to know things go in and out of fashion, and things not well received now can be totally reversed years later.

With every resurgence or generational turning, fashion and music becomes reiterated.

Fashion can be a very fickle lady, especially when it comes to models - fashion likes to turn on its own.

It may not be 'mainstream,' but there's always a market for science fiction.

Preppy never goes away. It just has its moment every 15 years, and then it goes back underground.

In fashion, everything comes and goes.

Everything comes back around. You never thought Louis Vuitton and Gucci and all that other stuff would come back. You know what I mean? And now it's one of the highest brands there is out. Everything just comes right back into circulation. Baggy jeans might come back out again. Might be a while, but they might.

The shifts happen on a regular basis, but it's like a cycle. So things come in and out of vogue and then five years later they're back in vogue. Or there seems to be a theory that this is the way the industry will go and everybody goes over that way and then something happens to the country and you're back again at the place you were.

Violet will be a good color for hair at just about the same time that brunette becomes a good color for flowers.

The first time I ever saw platform shoes in the '70s, I knew they'd been revived from the '40s, and I felt sickened. And for whatever reason, they keep getting revived. They've come back four times. I wish we could let them die. They want to die. They were horrible then, they're horrible now.

Fashion ... has brought every thing into vogue, by turns.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

I loved The Weird (one of the stories in it inspired Blackalley in Discourse).

As a result of reading science fiction when I was eight, I grew up with an interest in music, architecture, city planning, transportation, politics, ethics, aesthetics on any level, art...it's just total! It's a complete commitment to the whole human race on all the Earth. That's what science fiction is about.

Science fiction annoyed me because it was like, "Why is the world as it is not enough for you?"

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.

To me, it's science fiction for me to do the things I've been blessed to do in this industry.

Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.

It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

I think Ugg went out of being something that Kate Moss and Sienna Miller were wearing in high fashion circles and then they were embraced by everyone. Once something reaches that tipping point of mass popularity then suddenly the fashion world is a bit like, "Wah." As you say, you see them less kind of everywhere now so maybe it's time to bring them back.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.