Genre Characteristics Quotes

I suppose I am more comfortable with jazz because I have been playing it that much longer, and also because classical music is a much more disciplined genre.

All tragedies are finished by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.

With epic fantasy, there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack.

Science fiction is a weird category, because it's the only area of fiction I can think of where the story is not of primary importance. Science fiction tends to be more about the science, or the invention of the fantasy world, or the political allegory. When I left science fiction, I said "They're more interested in planets, and I'm interested in people."

The distinguishing characteristic of the techno-thriller is technical detail.

The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic.

That rockabilly sound wasn't as simple as I thought it was.

I think that what's unique about sci-fi - at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers - is that sci-fi is least-rooted in the particular culture that they're writing from.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

I describe television as feminine and movies as masculine, in the sense that television wants to examine a problem from all sides and talk about it for a long time, and movies just want to hit the climax and then maybe have a smoke.

I think that's one of the beautiful things about this genre is that everyone who's in it isn't in it to make a million bucks and be popular, because that's not always our M.O. Really, I think the last time that rock was truly in the mainstream was probably a point in time in the '90s when there was a lot of alternative that was on the pop charts.

Part of why I think I have so much fun working in the mockumentary genre is that you can cut to pretty much anything at any time. People are now so conditioned to watch documentaries - they know how they operate, and that you can introduce a new character by cutting to them, and now they're in it. Similarly, being able to treat a sidebar idea that has nothing to do with your main story really seriously, the way the rest of it is being treated - all the pomp and circumstances lend themselves, I feel, to making comedy feel really earned and funnier and weirder.

Dramas need to have a certain aesthetic that comedy just doesn't really seem to need to have.

I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels.

What genres are good for is being like, 'Here are the parameters. Here's something about the way it's going to make you feel. And here's something about the subject matter.'

The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?

You have to turn a blind eye to politics in nearly all Westerns.

I think what's fun about the Western genre is the character arcs are very strong and, arguably, more interesting and exciting than the action that is metaphorically representational of those arcs.

Most bands play one style of song. If you listen to Metallica it all sounds exactly like Metallica, and if you listen to Black Sabbath it all sounds like Black Sabbath. I like AC/DC a lot but you can pick those sounds out on the radio in a heartbeat because they all have certain things in common.