M. John Harrison Quotes

Comics is all about making it believable and helping people to get completely lost in a fictional world.

I think the most important technique is to ground everything, to make everything - to make fantasy world grounded and relatable, just great characters.

Realism isn't something most people associate with the fantasy genre, yet it's an essential element of great fantasy writing.

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

I'm used to something where you have to create an entire world, and I do like that process. I like getting the audience to believe that outside of the frame of your television set, there's a whole real world that exists that is different from your day-to-day reality.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

The benefit of having a story that takes place in the real world is that you don't have to invent the real world. It exists.

When I create a story, I can make it however funny, sad, or happy I want it to be. And when I read, I feel like I'm in the story, and I get to experience it. It feels like I'm watching someone else do something, but I'm doing the thing that the character is doing as well.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Interactive storytelling emphasizes a personal connection with the characters. It is a powerful tool that can draw you so deeply into the world of a story that you lose sight of it as a story. You think you are there - at least, if it is done right.

It never ceases to amaze me that readers who are willing to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the motivation of a vicious serial killer get high and mighty because I have put a coffee shop where there isn't one. Er... it's a novel. I made one up. I'm allowed to make stuff up. I'd go as far as to suggest that I make stuff up for a living.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that's rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, 'What if I wandered into this writer's people here?' If you've done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can't buy.

When you succeed at creating your own world, whether it's in any realm - like Tolkien was able to do - and people are able to enter that world, it's a special thing.

Accents can be a great tool to tell a story - but if you do it wrong, it pulls you right out of the movie.

Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.

Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don't bother to read.

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.

While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every last person out there isn't dating a writer.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.

I get to enter into the world the director has created: to live these different lives on top of my own life.