From a recent profile of China Miéville:
But he feels that fantastic tales are a natural part of storytelling. When skeptics ask him, “How did you get into sci-fi and fantasy?” he has a response. “My answer is: How did you get out of it?” says Mr. Miéville. “Because if you look at a roomful of kids, huge numbers of them will love aliens and monsters and witches…and at a certain point, some of them will start to leave that behind and go on to what they think of — wrongly — as more serious stuff.”
Via SF Signal.
Now, that is an excellent answer. Way, way better than, “Well, what I write isn’t really science fiction…” which seems to be the standard (and really annoying) answer from authors who want to consider themselves “serious.”