Dan Simmons Quotes - Page 2

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.

The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

We are all eaters of souls.

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.

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

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.

Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

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.

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

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

You have to live to really know things, my love

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.

Life doesn't retreat.

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.

Its hard to die. Harder to live

This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.

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

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.