Dan Simmons

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

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

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

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. ”

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

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

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. ”

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