73 Genre Quotes

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.

Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission.

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

I was familiar with that and 'Rio Bravo.' 'Rio Bravo' was what John Carpenter did, that brilliant move of taking a western and turning it into an urban flick. And from there you got, you know, all the cop genre movies of the time.

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed - now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down...

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

The first thing I ever thought of when I thought of 'Buffy: The Movie' was the little...blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed, in every horror movie. The idea of 'Buffy' was to subvert that idea, that image, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim. That element of surprise...[and] genre-busting is very much at the heart of both the movie and the series.

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.

Farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.

'There are a lot of good guys out there. I listen to some of these bands and I'm thinkin', 'If the singer didn't sing like that:' There's a great groundswell of talent in Norway and Sweden. I heard this one band and the guitar player was just ripping and then I looked on the internet and the guy's got hair down to his waist, he's covered in tattoos and piercings, and his face is painted black and white - fuck that! Walking around with an Oreo cookie for a head. An Oreo is two black cookies with a white cream filling. If I picked a guitar player and he showed up looking like that, I wouldn't answer the door! You'd see my redheaded ass goin' over the back fence!' -on Black Metal bands

'Is it (Sports Night) a comedy or a drama?' That's generally not a question I try and answer for myself before I'm going to write something. The example I would use is, if you're driving in your car and you're listening to a rock 'n' roll station on the radio and a song comes on, and in the song you hear elements of jazz and folk and you hear strings in there ... it's not necessary to answer the question, 'Is this jazz, is this folk, or is this rock?' before you decide to listen to it and like it or not.

Here is what I wrote about SF. If it has a familiar ring, my publishers liked it well enough to make it into a postcard for publicity purposes. 'I love SF for its surrealist verve, its loony non-reality, its piercing truths, its wit, its masked melancholy, its nose for damnation, its bunkum, its contempt for home comforts, its slewed astronomy, its xenophilia, its hip, its classlessness, its mysterious machines, its gaudy backdrops, its tragic insecurity.' Science fiction has always seemed to me such a polyglot, an exotic mistress, a parasite, a kind of new language coined for the purpose of giving tongue to the demented twentieth century.

People have told me it's like Touched by an Angel on acid. I think that's a good description.

Of course, there are hard rock fans who only like hard rock and that's OK, but I think the majority of the people out there are rather open minded. I always liked a lot of different styles and hard rock was just one of them.

By and large, horror fiction is the most difficult to domesticate because part of the point is that it's one step ahead - or behind - everybody else's taste. And I'm not really convinced I'd like it to change. There's something very healthy about horror fiction being always a little bit on the outside. It's the wild-dog genre.

At Sun Studio in Memphis Elvis Presley called to life what would soon be known as rock and roll with a voice that bore strains of the Grand Ole Opry and Beale Street, of country and the blues. At that moment, he ensured - instinctively, unknowingly - that pop music would never again be as simple as black and white.

'He was the most commercially successful singer of rock and roll, but he also had success with ballads, country, gospel, blues, pop, folk and even semi-operatic and jazz standards. His voice, which developed into many voices as his career progressed, had always a unique tonality and an extraordinarily unusual center of gravity, leading to his ability to tackle a range of songs and melodies which would be nearly impossible for most other popular singers to achieve'

'I fell in love with this song, mostly because of Elvis' superior voice, not really thinking about the true meaning behind the lyrics, but rather how the title relates to the music genre I play as DJ house music'.

'Blues, country, pop, rock and roll, gospel, and beyond, this man could sing anything. From the rockabilly of the Sun Sessions, to the MOR of 'Wooden Heart'(1960), to the later day 'Burnin' Love' (1972), Elvis proved that he had the skills as a vocalist that few have, or will ever have'

'What he actually did was take 'black' and 'white' music and transform them into this third thing; (in the final analysis), no one sang so many different kinds of music - rock, gospel, country, standards -, as well as Presley sang them, at such a high level, and for such a long time'

'But it is Presley's singing, halfway between a western and a rock 'n' roll style, that has sent teen-agers into a trance; they like his wailing in a popular song like 'Blue Moon' or such western tunes as 'I'll Never Let You Go', but they go crazy over the earthy, lusty mood of such rock 'n' roll numbers as 'Money Honey'; and the reason is simple enough: Presley sings with a beat; and you can be certain that there'll always be music with a beat and that, whether you like it or not, there will always be an Elvis Presley'

'Riding a streamlined rock-and-roll beat, the singer's vocal swoops, slurs, hiccups, moans and growls added up to a new pop singing vocabulary that was instantly memorized by scores of imitators. The antithesis of a relaxed conversational crooning, Presley's style was fraught with tension and animated by an attitude of self-conscious melodrama, woving the whole unwieldy spectrum of pop singing - country-blues, Italianate crooning, Gospel, soul shouting, and honky-tonk yodeling - into an integral personal style. His crowning touch was to accentuate the spontaneously exuberant humor that had always been an ingredient of country, and the blues, but singing it in a way that seemed to poke fun at his own accomplishment.'

[Is '90 Millas' another crossover -- into World Music?] I can see that. The core is African rhythm -- half of the world's music comes from that. The difference between our music and American blues: Cubans may have been slaves, but in Cuba slaves became part of the family. They could buy their freedom. And they are Island people. And Island people are happier. But, you know, in the '80s, when we released 'Conga,' wasn't that World Music? Everywhere we went, people got it. And why? The drums. So maybe all music is World Music, and the only question is: Do you like it?

(On receiving Best Actor in a Drama) 'I don't know whether to be happy or ashamed, because I thought we made a comedy.'

'Also, if I recall, there was A LOT of concern before STS came out that it would be basically an industrial/electronic album.'

As a science fiction fan, I have long been very familiar with the various themes in the field. The superman theme has been one of them ever since Samson and Hercules. I just sat down and wrote a story of that type - only in this first story, the Superman was a villain. A couple of months after I published this story, it occurred to me that a Superman as a hero rather than as a villain might make a great comic strip character in the vein of Tarzan, only more super and sensational than that great character. Joe and I drew it up as a comic book.

Eleven dead bodies. One dead cat. No breasts.

I don't even think that you can call Iron Maiden 100% real metal. Iron Maiden is beyond that and always has been. That is one of the things that America has always had a problem with, but right now we might be moving to a point where by America may actually understand what Maiden is all about. We'll see.

An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

If jazz should threaten to become a hampering stereotype, a 'tradition' in its turn, George would go forward to the next fresh impulse that arose in him. You may call him the King of jazz and associate his name with the lifting of jazz into musical artistry. Very well, and his best thanks. But not on that account is he to be thrust into a pigeonhole. George Gershwin did not begin as a jazzer; he will not end as one.

I actually hate comic book movies, like fucking hate them, they just bore me shitless and they're just dumb. But I thought what Chris Nolan did with Batman was actually really good, really well directed, and Christian Bale was really great in it.

Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying?

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

I was determined to avoid the 'hero as self-aware damaged person' paradigm. I'm afraid as a reader I got sick of all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre.

Specifically, I was determined to avoid the hero-as-self-aware-damaged-person paradigm. I'm afraid as a reader I got sick of all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre.

The stories are all very contemporary, but Reacher is an old-West character for sure. He could be a Zane Grey character. But the funny thing is, I didn't really realize that until well after the first book was written, and I wasn't a big Western fan as a kid.

This band is metal in that we have a lot of metal in our instruments, and there's quite a lot of metal on my belt buckle as well.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.

Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.

There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.

Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.

The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be.