Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the FIRST TIME, I felt LIKE I had LEARNED another language, MASTERED a new culture, adopted a new religion.

Inevitably, most READERS COME to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his FICTION. Whatever VALUE they MIGHT have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.

A petty reason PERHAPS why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from JOURNALISTS is that novelists are trying to WRITE the TRUTH and journalists are trying to write fiction.

And NOWADAYS, the idea of AI is not REALLY science FICTION anymore - it's just science fact.

I was not into SCI-FI, SCIENCE FICTION, at all. I was into some of the OLD pirate films with Burt Lancaster and stuff. I liked them.

I think a CHILD should be ALLOWED to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of AGE. Paternity is a legal FICTION.

Of course I didn't pioneer the USE of FOOD in fiction: it has been a STANDARD LITERARY device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a METAPHOR for sensuality.

We don't TEND to write about disease in fiction - not just TEEN novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is ROOM only for SACRIFICE, HEROISM, war, politics and family struggle.

There are some subjects that can only be tackled in FICTION.

We need a LOT more positive LATIN ROLE models in movies and in television. They EXIST! It's not FICTION.

My personality has two sides: a very social side and a reclusive side. I LOVE WRITING fiction, although I can't imagine ever being LOCKED up in a ROOM writing all the time.

It's HARD to GET JUSTICE in the real world. It's POSSIBLE in fiction.

I don't LIKE to read FICTION. I like to learn SOMETHING when I'm READING.

'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons' is a kind of novel in VERSE about the ARC of an URBAN LESBIAN love affair - and I suppose there is a certain amount of voyeurism in the CONSUMPTION of fiction! The 'Sancerre' poems here are more contemplative and about the relationship of the individual to local and wider histories.