Chelan Simmons Quotes

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

I like the Sci Fi channel and 'Science Fiction Theatre.' I've been doing a lot of television-watching and thinking about good songs to write.

In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.

I read anything and everything. Comfort food for my brain is fantasy fiction or science fiction.

When James Bond presses the watch and the car explodes, the writer doesn't go into the science of it. One should leave it to the leap of faith. I have tried to explain as much as possible, and what I can't, I have left it to people's imagination.

I like to have my imagination get blown, like 'Aliens.'

I like some science in my science fiction.

When they're watching musicals, I've heard people say, 'That's not realistic! Why would they just start singing?' But, I think they can believe it if they try! I mean, science fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, but people allow themselves to sit back and enjoy it anyway.

I'm particularly fond of sci-fi and fantasy genres.

I think, as human beings, we all have a fundamental mode, a basic way of relating to the rest of reality, and for me, it's always instinctively been about sound making and trying to extract information, grammar, meaning from sound making. That's been my way of navigating reality that's very personal; a painter might say they make marks or look.

Sci-fi always appealed to me, like, since I was a kid.

The beauty of science fiction is that it takes the audience's guard down; they're much more willing to open themselves up and allow themselves to be questioned and have their values questioned when they don't think we're talking about their world or them and what they're used to.

Gosh, for me, when I was 15 or 16 years old, I was just starting to understand ideas and film and things like that. And then, you go see a movie like 'The Matrix' that absolutely blows your mind. It's not just trying to entertain you, but it's also trying to explore something about human nature and ask some really deep questions.

We have to be able to use our imaginations to make the character's experiences real to us.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

I'm not a very big fan of science fiction. I think that I'm a very big fan of living in the physical world.

Sometimes you're talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.

I think reality is over-rated