Quotes by James Gunn

A few years ago, a fellow professor stopped at my door and said, You're here in your office more than my full-time colleagues, and I replied, Writers don't retire, they just go out of print. With electronic publication, even that doesn't have to happen.

As for going to the stars, The Listeners concluded that it was inherently impossible and the only contact would be through radio. I believe that this may be true; on the other hand, I still nurse my youthful aspirations to go to the stars, and I think that humanity should pursue it - after all, we have not reached the pinnacle of science and technology.

As for the torture of fans waiting for the other shoe(s) to drop, I hope that it is true - that there are readers out there panting to know what is going to happen to Adrian and Frances and Jessica, and who can't wait to find out who the aliens are and why they sent spaceship plans and what they want with humans. I must admit that I am curious, too.

But, on the most part, he belonged to the optimists; he felt that there would be time enough to suffer when catastrophe really struck.

I could give you some names of Workshop participants who are as good as many who are being published but haven't had the right editor recognize their merit or have not been adequately published.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

I feel a bit like Ellen Glasgow (I think it was) who said that she was the master and characters did what she said. I'm envious of authors whose characters become so real to them that they take off in their own directions, but my philosophy of teaching, as well as writing, is to demystify the process.

I hope I'm still alive to see an expedition set off for Mars.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.

It also is true that some ideas naturally work themselves out over a longer period of time than a single human life can encompass.

Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that nothing is what it seems). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.

One should be willing to throw away a dozen ideas to come up with a good one, just as one should throw away a dozen words to come up with the right one.

Scientists do their best work when they are in their early years. Writers' skills don't necessarily decay; if they can keep their interests and hopes alive (like Jack Williamson), their experience allows them greater depths to explore.

That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them.

The compassion is instigated by the situation, and Godwin, a bit ham-handedly, belabors the situation so that there can be no doubt in the reader's mind, makes Marilyn sweet, young, and innocent (rather than a cold-blooded murderer or serial killer) so that reader will want to save her - and then the realization of the cold equations will be more effective.

We can have rounded characters in SF if they are, when push comes to shove, representative when it comes to responding to their situations -- thus Lije Baley in Asimov's The Caves of Steel is a representative of his enclosed metropolis, but he learns to rise above it, to understand his agoraphobia and cope with it.

What you call the Golden Age tradition of stringing stories together into novels was not so much a tradition as a consequence of the fact that almost no genre SF novels were published between 1926 and 1946.