Literary Birthday – 30 June – Adam Roberts

Happy Birthday, Adam Roberts, born 30 June 1965.

Seven Quotes

A realist writer might break his protagonist’s leg, or kill his fiancee; 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.
I never liked the news; it pretends to be all different, every day, when in fact it is all the same.
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.
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.
Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar.
I read a lot, partly because I review a lot and write criticism and so on; but mostly because I love reading.
We all tell ourselves stories all the time; it’s how we all get through our days.

Adam Roberts is an academic, critic, and novelist. His novels include Jack Glass, Salt, and Yellow Blue Tibia.

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