Dan Simmons
It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Trust
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.Collection: Teacher
I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.Collection: Teacher
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.
As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.
I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.
It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.
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.
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.
No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
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.
It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.Collection: Talking
The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancerCollection: Cancer
There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.Collection: Dream
The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.Collection: Love
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Grease
Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.Collection: Reality
A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.Collection: Self
Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.Collection: Death
Context is to data what water is to a dolphinCollection: Data
There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.Collection: Pain
No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.Collection: Book
The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.Collection: Being Strong
Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.Collection: Truth
I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.Collection: Faith
In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.Collection: Loyalty
Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.Collection: Night
Love is nothing but lust misspelled.Collection: Love
The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.Collection: Summer
The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.Collection: Revelations
Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.Collection: Stupidity
Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.Collection: Dream
If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.Collection: Done
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.Collection: Decision
We are all eaters of souls.Collection: Soul
Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.Collection: Art
Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.Collection: Expression
Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.Collection: Art
If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.Collection: Insanity
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.Collection: Identity
I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailedCollection: Wanted
Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.Collection: Pain
The powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices.Collection: Powerful
You have to live to really know things, my loveCollection: Knows
Life doesn't retreat.Collection: Life