Quotes by Dan Simmons

• It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.
• No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
• The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.
• 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.
• 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.
• As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.
• It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?
• I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.
• I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.
• 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.
• 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's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.