Dan Simmons

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

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

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

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

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.

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!'