Quotes from Dan Simmons

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

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.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them ... they may be forced to die by them.

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

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

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

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

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

Writing, Im convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.

Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

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.

Life doesn't retreat.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

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