John Allison Quotes

As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.

When I was a kid, I read many of my mom's books. Sometimes, there were mysteries, but there were no delineations, and my mother never talked about book genres. Nor did we differentiate genres in school.

I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores.

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

One of the interesting things about YA books - I don't know about Percy Jackson, but I do know about 'Twilight' and 'Maximum Ride': There are a lot of adult readers. In fact, we released 'Maximum Ride' both as a paperback for kids and as a mass release for adults.

'Snowpiercer' is a little bit more experimental, I think, and crafted for a slightly different audience. 'The Giver' is more about teen angst.

The distinction has blurred between young adult and adult books. Some of the teen books have become more sophisticated.

Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

Some of my favorite books to read are young adult books.

As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.

I read anything I could get my hands on: science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers. I even became hooked on the Bantam reprints of the old pulp novels from thirties and forties: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger.

I'm a storyteller, and there's some genres I like. I don't think I'm ever going to do science fiction, but I want to do a musical one day. I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.

The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.

When I look at Perfidia, I think, "That's a Pulitzer Prize winner. That's a National Book Award winner." It's not going to get it. It's going to be shelved in crime and it's just the way it is. I've done something that no one else has ever done; I've started out as a mystery writer, a police writer, and a crime writer, and I became something entirely different.

I've been an avid consumer of young adult literature since I was one, and I think some people leave that stuff behind when they become old adults, but I never did. I was always interested in the fantasy world created in those novels.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that COULD happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that COULDN'T happen - though often you only wish that it could.

Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions.

Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.