Science fiction writers I am sorry to say really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Now I'm a failed political consultant. But sometimes fiction has a way of capturing people's imagination in a way that non-fiction doesn't. Conservatives typically haven't written much fiction - specifically political thrillers - over the years to educate inspire and mobilize people on issues of great import but we ought to.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination without it there can be no understanding indeed no fiction.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it's science fiction horror or really anything. I'm just drawn to quality. I don't think 'Darkness Falls' is horror there isn't any gore by any stretch of the imagination.

Imagination it turns out is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing which means in one sense that none of it is true. Yet in the writing and perhaps in the reading some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known using that as scaffolding and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

For someone who writes fiction in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious it's essential to be free.

I know how fiction matters to me because if I want to express myself I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Some major writers have a huge impact like Ayn Rand who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction but it really isn't fiction at all.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire Barack Obama is president of the United States is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.