Literary Birthday – 30 June – Adam Roberts

Happy Birthday, Adam Roberts, born on 30 June 1965.

Adam Roberts Quotes

1. A realist writer might break his protagonist’s leg, or kill his fiancée; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.
2. I never liked the news; it pretends to be all different, every day, when in fact it is all the same.
3. My experience is that there are people who, perhaps vaguely, like the idea of being writers, and then there are actual writers. The difference between these two groups is that the former can take it or leave it, depending on various circumstances; whereas the latter have no option but to write.
4. To say a word once is communicative, to say it twice is emphatic, but to say it twenty times turns it into a trippy floating nothing.
5. Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar.
6. I read a lot, partly because I review a lot and write criticism and so on; but mostly because I love reading.
7. We all tell ourselves stories all the time; it’s how we all get through our days.

Adam Roberts is a British academic, critic, and writer. He is a science fiction and fantasy novelist. In 2018 he was elected vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society. His novels include Jack Glass, Salt, and Yellow Blue Tibia. Roberts has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Source for image: Georges Seguin (Okki), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adam_Roberts_20080315_Salon_du_livre_1.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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