Norman Spinrad Quotes

If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

In America, if you don't do a 100 million dollars, you've done nothing.

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.

I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless.

Chaos is the enemy of Order but the enemy of Chaos is also the enemy of Order

If it's not American, the French won't go see it.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I write in American slang.

I was a precocious reader.

I never learned to read music.

All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.

English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.

There are certain things that ordinary people have that celebrities don't have.

I believe that interest in heroes is universal and eternal.

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make sense: 'Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.'

Is anything accidental?

You can really do more than you think you can do.

The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out, and nobody wants to buy.

When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money.

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.

At least as coherent as the Gettysburg Address backwards in Albanian, anyway.

Kiss me, and you'll live forever. You'll be a frog, but you'll live forever.

Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality

We shall give up the things of childhood -- gods and demons, planets and suns, guilts and regrets.

It ain't power that corrupts, it's the changes you put your head through getting it.