Quotes from Dan Simmons

Love is nothing but lust misspelled.

The love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.

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

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.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

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

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.

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

The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.

A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatazoa attacking an ovum.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

All this natural misery," Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. "Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?

Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.

The day is perfect and I hate it for being so.

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short . It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?

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

I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.

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.

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

Do you think it's ready? I [Silenus, The Poet] asked. It's perfect... a masterpiece. Do you think it'll sell? I asked. No fucking way.