Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.
Dan SimmonsWilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.
Dan SimmonsI think challenges are what any decent writer would be all about. If you actually do find your slide and grease it, shame on you. Me, I get bored very easily. As a writer I get bored even faster than I do in real life. I mean, I like fast cars; I've driven a lot of racecars. You need some stimulation. If I find something that seems too difficult to do, too difficult to research, or beyond your writing abilities, it's a perfect invitation to try it.
Dan SimmonsWriting, 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.
Dan SimmonsLife is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
Dan SimmonsThere'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.
Dan SimmonsIt started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri
Dan SimmonsLaws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.
Dan SimmonsWar 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.
Dan SimmonsMovie 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.
Dan SimmonsThe powerful have received their share of the world's attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victim's remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces -- and voices.
Dan SimmonsWords are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.
Dan SimmonsThe beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.
Dan SimmonsBooks ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.
Dan SimmonsIt no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
Dan SimmonsI knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed
Dan SimmonsEvolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.
Dan SimmonsHistory viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
Dan SimmonsTo see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.
Dan SimmonsPain 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.
Dan SimmonsFate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.
Dan SimmonsEvery 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.
Dan SimmonsThe future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.
Dan SimmonsThis is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.
Dan SimmonsI think all the simple things can and do still work - holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.
Dan SimmonsPain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.
Dan SimmonsNo 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.
Dan SimmonsSpeaking 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.
Dan SimmonsBut I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
Dan SimmonsWords bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
Dan SimmonsGass 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 spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.
Dan SimmonsThe love of violence is an aspect of our humanity. Even the weak wish to be strong primarily so they can wield the whip.
Dan SimmonsThere were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.
Dan Simmons