Gary Shteyngart Quotes

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.

I started writing stories in my spare time.

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

Sometimes when it comes to the iconic kind of moments, when I read the script for the first time, you get little goose bumps or something because it really is kind of exciting.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.

I have to believe SF writers will continue to inspire the public to have faith in - to demand! - a future that is at least as big and bold as the past.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.'

I started to read at a very early age, and I just thought that books and reading were really the most wonderful thing that life had to offer. I think I wrote my very first piece of fiction at the age of 12, but then I didn't write any more for quite a long time.

Not many people give you a vision of what the future will bring.

The long view counts.

Science fiction writers create all sorts of futures - that comes with the job. But it's not the type that matters - hopeful or dark - it's the variety we see as readers. It's nurturing the imaginations of those who will go on to create the world around us.

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.

As I'm writing it, I'm kind of curious to see what's going to happen. It almost feels like I'm the writer and I'm the listener, too.

Imagination judges the future by the past, but concerns itself with the future more than with the past.