Gary Shteyngart Quotes

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

I always felt that sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. Bit of a geek, I'm afraid. But I like creating worlds, and I felt it was a genre that gave me more freedom. It just seemed like I belonged there.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

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

The idea of science fiction, mythology, and creating a world is my favourite thing. I do love the reality of dramas and playing that, but being able to start from scratch, to completely build the character and this world, I love that.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

I've always loved massive worlds, whether in fantasy or science fiction. I like the idea of making my own rules as well as utilizing everything that I love or inspires me. It's very freeing to know you can write a story that can be as big as your own imagination.

With my writing, I can still play inside an enchanted castle or live inside an old fort. I can run from ghosts or ride dolphins any day of the week.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.

Fantasy and science fiction are where my brain lives.

With any kind of sci-fi, the imagination continues, and the world exists, and you create that in your own mind, and it lives in you.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

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

Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

I loved the world of imagination.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

I could never write about strange kingdoms. I could never do 'Harry Potter' or anything like that. Even when I did science-fiction, I didn't write about foreign planets and distant futures. I certainly never did fantasies about trolls living under bridges.

For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.