There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.

I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me

When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced.

The basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.

The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.