Karl Schroeder Quotes

All that I did was to avail myself of the great privileges of the fiction writer, spring over every scientific difficulty with fancy’s seven-leagued boots, and create on paper what other men were planning out in steel and other metals.

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.

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

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

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

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

Fantasy and science fiction are where my brain lives.

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 think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

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

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'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.

I'm not well-versed in the science fiction world. I'm hoping that I'll get more opportunities in it because you get to create a new world.

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.

I'm a big believer that sci-fi lives in literature, that the true sci-fi population is out there reading a gazillion authors.

As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.