8 Quotes by John Clute

Each of them is a book through which other books dream. (referring to Nodier's SMARRA and TRILBY)

An edifice is more than a house and less than a City, though it may resemble a house from the outside and a city from within. From without, an edifice may seem self-contained and finite; from within, it may well extend beyond lines of vision, both spatially and temporally. In almost every possible way, edifices manifest a principle central to the description of most physical structures in fantasy: there is always more to them than meets the eye.

Sense of Wonder (...) may be defined as a shift in perspective so that the reader, having been made suddenly aware of the true scale of an event or venue, responds to the revelation with awe.

Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre.

Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.

Genres do exist because frequent users of any large bookstore can instantly tell what any piece of fiction is supposed to be about by its title, its cover and its location in the shop.

We cannot afford to exclude any vision - any way of looking at the world - that human beings have invented for ourselves.

We cannot afford to exclude any vision – any way of looking at the world – that human beings have invented for ourselves.