Quotes from Dan Simmons

the suicidal smell of cigarettes

Siri, am I doing the right thing?

You're disgusting," said Brawne Lamia. "Ah, darling," smiled Silenus, "those are the same words you whispered last night after your second orgasm.

SOMETIMES SIRI SEEMED so ignorant it made me sick.

This is poetry. You're writing about Heaven's Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a cynical look at humanity.

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

Thinking none of this but feeling all of it

judiciously

the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments.

Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the others' successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in his or her heart that he or she was a true artist of the word who merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.

it's the mind analogy that bothers Crozier the most. Haunted and plagued by melancholia much of his life, knowing it as a secret weakness made worse by his twelve winters frozen in arctic darkness as an adult, feeling it recently triggered into active agony by Sophia Cracroft's rejection

Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and

Kale pe a," repeated my friend. "It is an ancient Tibetan farewell when a caravan sets out to climb the high peaks. It means—go slowly if you wish to return." And

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.

Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.

Just as well," he said. "We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.

It isn't hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own.

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 last six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?

It's wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves Ã¢â'¬Â¦ culturally and physically.

Sarai gripped his hand. "Do you think you're the only one who has had the dream?" "Dream?" managed Sol. She

Choose again

Remember, the economy wasn't really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.

For the thousandth time, I wondered if there were a way to reprogram this autonomous intelligence so that it wasn't such a pain in the ass.