Top 35 Ann Leckie Quotes

When I need to get away from my desk, I tend to take walks or go places. I also like to bead – working with beads to make jewellery.

I can’t see potato chips being popular where there’s not land to grow potatoes in or where frying in lots of oil isn’t easy or convenient.

I’ve always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along.

Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.

The lessons of slushing and editing build up over time, and you’re not necessarily thinking about them while you’re working, but they’re in the back of your mind, probably influencing your choices.

Occasionally, I hear grumbles about everything being a series or a trilogy, but apart from the question of them maybe selling more books, I think that there’s a real problem in trying to introduce a new world or a new concept while also getting your reader to pay close attention to your characters and themes.

I tend to edit some as I go – partly because one of the reasons I don’t outline much is that I don’t know what the next scene will be until I’ve actually written the previous scene.

One of the awesome things about being a writer is that I can research nearly anything – tea? Bubblegum? Ants? Neurology? Chocolate? Textile production? It doesn’t matter. It’s all productive work.

The ‘indistinguishable from magic’ thing is highly dependent on where a viewer is looking from and not something intrinsic to any particular sort of tech.

When I’m writing, I don’t really have much other guide than, ‘As a reader, how would I respond to this?’

I’ve been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun.

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about ‘adventure,’ but writers can’t build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

Working for several years as a waitress, you learn really quickly a couple of default scripts, so you know exactly what the interaction is going to be when the person sits down at the table.

I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we’re so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they’re doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality.

Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding – the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.

One of the nice things about a second book is that your readers already have so much of the introductions on board, they don’t have to put all their attention into figuring out the world and can more easily let that play out as a background to the other things you want to do.

The ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ isn’t just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.

If you can’t access it, all the resources in the universe won’t do you any good.

Writing books can be very individual – one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.

Does getting an award make you happy? When you imagine yourself at the ceremony, you’re always so eloquent and gracious. In reality, it’s kind of awkward.

‘Ancillary Sword’ picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

‘Fountain of youth’ is actually kind of ambiguous – does it mean a way to make everyone healthy and let them live indefinitely? Or are we talking about something that would reset you physically to the way you were in your youth, which for various reasons not all of us would be enthused about?

‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I’ve heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.

I do realize the impulse to classify people by the food and art they consume is strong – sometimes I have to remind myself not to do that.

You write alone, but you write hoping that there will be readers who will connect with what you write, and it’s so wonderful and amazing – I can’t even tell you – when that actually happens.

Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.

I’m one of those people who always wanted to be a writer, so I have a fair amount of juvenilia, though fortunately, I was too old for my juvenilia to be on the Internet.

I didn’t ever imagine, except in the most idle, obviously wish-fulfillment, ego-gratification fantasies, that anything I wrote would ever win awards, let alone so many.

What would it be like to live 500 years? Healthy years, of course; no one wants to live 500 years in a coma on a respirator. But reasonably healthy all that time? That would be awesome!

One day, I discovered that a couple of people had written ‘fanfic’ – stories of their own based on my characters. Just the thought of people thinking that hard and deeply about something I’ve written is incredible.

In so much SF, either gender roles are the ones we’re used to in the here and now, only transported to the future, or else they’re supposedly different, but characters still are slotting into various stereotypes.

I do think that narrative is very important – I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

When I was a kid, I had no perception whatever that science fiction was supposed to be a boys’ club.

I don’t think anybody submits their first story and sells right away.

Now, I personally enjoy a really good footnote.