Genre Distinction Quotes

If you take 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' as books, one is written for children, and one is an adult's book.

My faith plays a big part in who I am: a Christian guy playing pop-rock music. I'm in a pop-rock band, not a Christian band.

The distinctions of what makes a book one genre or another can sometimes be a bit muddy, but generally it's a matter of projecting who the audience will be, which is a judgment that's based on the subject matter. 'Mainstream' is the cleanest label for a book that draws readers of both sexes and from a wide age-range.

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

I don't know why records are treated different than books. I don't know why an Eminem record is different than a Stephen King movie.

Where do you even draw the line between genres?

I tend to watch things that aren't really the genre of my own work.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

I'm a fantasy writer. I don't do SF. This is important to me. If you're not clear on what genre you're in, everything gets muddled, and it's hard to know which rules you're breaking.

If a piece of music is under three minutes long, it's rock. Over three minutes, it's classical.

Science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on outside.

I'm an artist; I'm not a rapper.

In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.

When people say to me 'what do you think of rap music?' my answer is there's no such thing. There's rap and there's music.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the '70s sounds nothing like the stuff from the '80s, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the '90s. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed.

Science fiction is really a rather tiny business compared with its giant cousin, which is fantasy.

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

I love heavy music. I keep Flume nice and melodic, so I save the angry, testosterone-fueled heavy stuff for What So Not. I think it's a good defining thing for the two projects.

I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.

When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know what can't happen. They have to know it's a fantasy. But when I write for adults, they have to think it's real. Every detail has to be real or they won't buy it.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.