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" I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people. "

Related Quotes:

" Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system. "

Robert J. Sawyer

War

Class

Political

" I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Understand

Person

" A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them. "

" My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales. "

" I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character. "

" The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont. "

" Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon. "

" Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it. "

" It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't. "

" Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means. "

" Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future. "

" Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity. "

" We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more. "

" Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being. "

" The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about. "

" One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life. "

" The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means. "

" When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future. "

" I am very pro-science. "

Robert J. Sawyer

I Am

Very

" You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers. "

" When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic. "

" George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Success

Classic

" Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go. "

" Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters. "

" Everything is cross-platform now. That's part of the reality that we live in - a multifaceted, multimedia world - and I'm delighted to be a part of that. "

" I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Would

Write

" If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited. "

" The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel. "

" What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader. "

" When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant. "