Amity Gaige Quotes

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

With BSG, sci-fi is the human experience taken beyond the envelope. When I first became involved with the project, I knew that I would be able to play a human being for many years, exploring and reflecting on issues that would impact people's lives.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

I thought this was the most incredible opportunity. Because 'Planet Of The Apes,' aside from the fantasy element of talking apes, is such an amazing franchise, because under the surface of that genre, you're actually looking at human nature.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

I probably get more inspiration for human stories and idiosyncrasies than I do animal stories.

I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

All literature is gossip.

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.

I love fantasy. I love horror. I love musicals. Whatever doesn't really happen in life is what I'm interested in. As a way of commenting on everything that does happen in life, because ultimately the only thing I'm really interested in is people.