Giles Foden quotes

  • Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

  • What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

  • The reality of any location in Britain being used in a TV program of a film is that something bad is going to happen! That's the nature of drama. Most of the things that get made or basically grisly detective shows about murders, accidents or medical dramas.

  • The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

  • Where there's a will there's a detective story.

  • I told him about me being a summoner, and what that entailed. At the end of he simply gave a long sigh. “Why couldn’t you simply be an alcoholic like all the other detectives?” I grinned. “Demon summoning has less vomiting!

  • This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

  • Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

  • I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

  • The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.