David Brin Quotes

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

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

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

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.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it's possible to learn how things are done - the mechanics of writing, so to speak - and which genres and authors excel in various areas.

I never thought I could write fiction.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

I read a lot of fiction.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.