Dan Simmons

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

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.

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

We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'

If I had written something, and I had written myself into a corner, I didn't abandon it. Because I remembered: There's always more.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.