Dan Simmons

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them, they may be forced to die by them.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

In twentieth century Old Earth a fast food chain took dead cow meat fried it in grease added carcinogens wrapped it in petroleum based foam and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

Seduction was both a science and art, a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

He loved the darkness and mystery of the Catholic service the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become Him the smell of incense and mystical chanting.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.

Power a currency that never went out of style.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.