Genre Quotes - page 20
I think the genre decides for me-which sounds like a way of avoiding the question unless I explain first that this chameleon-like border crossing, this shifting of genre identities is, I realize, parallel to, or anticipates, or recollects my own life. I'm probably fluctuating across genres perhaps because my identity itself is always in flux...
Ariel Dorfman
I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors.
Lois Lowry
The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that.
Christopher Moore (author)
If it's some style, especially some shrink-wrapped thing hanging on a wall at Toys 'R' Us, then it won't live, it won't be dynamic ... It becomes exactly what the marketing people want - a genre, something to make their job easier. But if it's something like, "Everybody's telling me the wall's over there, but I'm going to push against it and see if it's really there" - to me, that's what punk is. An idealistic attitude.
Mike Watt
Make no mistake, there's formula detective fiction, there's formula science fiction...but there's formula literary fiction too. It's genre snobbery that we're only ready to acclaim stuff that's of the genre but different in some way. It's sci-fi but, it's fantasy but... I didn't want to write a but.
Marlon James
She was an utter inspiration,” said Steven Barnes, a longtime friend and science fiction author who was the first African American to write one of the novels based on "Star Wars.” "I don't know what would have happened to me had I not had her as an example.” Mystery writer Walter Mosley said Butler expanded the genre "by writing a kind of fiction that African American women around the country could read and understand both technically and emotionally.... She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels, she was writing very difficult, brilliant work.” "For an African American woman to somehow define herself as a science fiction writer and to realize that dream is an extraordinary thing,” he said in an interview Monday. "In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch,” writer Tananarive Due said. "So we just lost our mother, our grandmother.
Octavia Butler
There's simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It's about the positing of something impossible-whether not-yet-possible or never-possible-and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It's carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it's rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it's that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is "about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that-I think that those are inevitable components, but it's the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don't surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, "It's okay, this isn't really about spaceships or aliens, it's about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.
China Miéville
Well you know, I don't think I have never really seen a film of this genre, where the female characters' sex appeal sort of came second. I mean of course they're sexy characters. When you have a sexy secretary, or a girl swinging around by her ankles in a cat suit, you know that's innately sexy, but the fact is that these characters are intelligent. They're ambitious. They're motivated and calculated to some degree.
Scarlett Johansson
There are writers in commercial women's fiction who get really worked up, and they blog about [the label] and rail against the establishment. I can empathize and understand that frustration, but at the same time, it's a waste of energy. I look at what the readers and writers of the romance genre have done in creating a parallel universe where they sell millions of books to readers who know these writers are good. They don't need the stamp of approval. And what I love about my readers is that they are far more sophisticated, in my opinion, than most literary critics, and far less insecure. At the end of the day, people are reading my books and communicating directly with me, thanks to technology.
Alisa Valdes
I get no sense from Morrison's work that he has any "love for the genre.” I get the same vibe I get from Moore-a cold and calculated mixing of ingredients the writer knows the fans like, but to which the writer himself has no eviceral [sic] connection. Nostalgia without being nostalgic, as I have dubbed it. (2004)
John Byrne
Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects. That means if you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.
Patrick Rothfuss
They provide relief. Sometimes, it's the relief of the same genre as what we find in a church sanctuary when the minister ascends to the pulpit and late-morning sunlight is blasting through the windows behind him to gild him and the congregants before you as the choir reaches the climax of the doxology. Sometimes, it's the relief of a kind yet somehow firm-and-gentle hand at the back of the neck, kneading away not sorrow but the loneliness that can attend it. Sometimes, it's the relief of discovering you're no longer bound by the laws of gravity and that, yes, you can actually fly. Sometimes, it's an answer. Stories do all of these things for us. I'm convinced we'd be utterly lost without them.
Tochi Onyebuchi
![[In] "Terminator 2" Arnold Schwarzenegger would portray a good Terminator instead of a bad one. Had this been kept a secret, it would have packed a wallop. Knowing the twist beforehand neither ruins the overall movie-going experience nor damages its integrity, but it's not unlike being aware of the identity of Luke's father while watching The Empire Strikes Back.
It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release, few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration. (James Berardinelli)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/62/james-berardinelli-bad-damages-972762.webp)
