Ted Chiang Quotes

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

I don't go around thinking I'm Ray Bradbury all the time.

Science fiction is like a blender - you can put in any historical experience and take influences from everything you see, read or experience.

I'm very interested in science fiction, and I like new things. I've never been a really sentimental person.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

Ray Bradbury is one who is contributing to the understanding of the imagination and the curiosity of the human race.

I grew up reading SF in the '70s and '80s, and I like fast, thought-provoking plots that take you places in fully realized worlds.

We never had books at home, but my dad, seeing how keen I was to read, took me to Islington Library when I was about eight and we pulled out two - a Biggles and a science fiction novel. I never got the ace fighter pilot but fell in love with all things to do with the future and space. Isaac Asimov soon became my guiding star.

I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.

But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves, as a matter of fact.

The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.

I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that's what really got me hooked. You could say that's where it all began.

Ray Bradbury was the first author that I was really exposed to back in grade school. I'm a big Philip K. Dick fan, but the emotion and humanity that Bradbury brings to his stories and the way he uses sci-fi to get at the human heart is something that's unique and for me incredibly influential.

When I was thirteen, I was in a supermarket with my mother, and for no reason at all, I picked up a science-fiction book at the checkout stand and started reading it. I couldn't believe I was doing that, actually reading a book. And, man, it opened up a whole new thing. Reading became the sparkplug of my imagination.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.

I've always been a fan of science fiction.