Kevin J. Anderson Quotes

We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.

When I was doing preliminary research on this case, I remembered the story about Tlazolteotl.' [Mulder] glanced at the old archaeologist. 'Am I pronouncing it correctly? It sounds like I'm swallowing a turtle.

Every life has a destiny... the trick is to discover it before then end of your life. Otherwise, you will have too many regrets.

If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.

I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.

That's what people need to remember about reviewers; opinions can be all over the spectrum, and you just need to find a reviewer whose tastes match your own.

Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.

My wife and I are involved in writing/publishing/promotion twenty-four/seven. It isn't a day job; it's life.

Patrick Rothfuss gives us a fabulous debut, standing firmly on the main stage of the fantasy genre and needing no warm-up act. Jordan and Goodkind must be looking nervously over their shoulders!

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

My dad is a bank president and my mom was an accountant and they didn't think that seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical, you see. Of course, I was just as determined to do it.

Wouldn't you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don't have to look everything up and remember everything?

One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.

I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it's supposed to.

If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.

We must think beyond ourselves

I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.

The real key is time management and being able to focus on what you need to, on using every available minute to accomplish something that needs to be done.

Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too.

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.

I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.

I want to make it so that so many things happen... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.

When tending a vast and beautiful garden, you have to plant many seeds, never knowing ahead of time which ones will germinate, which will produce the most glorious flowers, which will bear the sweetest fruit. A good gardener plants them all, tends and nurtures them, and wishes them well. Optimism is the best fertilizer.

I've had the same, full-time assistant and typist for eight or nine years now. She's read everything I've written, she types everything and does a good job, translates it and makes comments.

We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.

There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books.

The people who make policy decisions should damned well know what they are talking about before they make the decisions. There is nobody who is an expert on cloning who would be afraid after seeing Attack of the Clones.

No, no, no - you don't argue with concepts. You have to claim Dogma, and therefore leave no room for rational thought.

I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.

In a certain sense, this guy - who is one of the most evil people in the book - he's not really that bad at running the show, because he knows what he's doing, he's smart and he's got the big picture in mind. He's like the Godfather.

If you look at the British royal family and take away the scandals and the goofy stuff that's going on, people love to have this king to look up to - the royals are like celebrities.

Well, I know that George Lucas doesn't like it at all. When I was working on The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, he told me that he would be happy if every copy could be tracked down and smashed.

A moment of consideration often prevents a thousand apologies

We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.

For a feature in next month's issue of Prog magazine, the photographer spent many hours setting up a photo shoot of me with part of my music collection in my writing office. Since I do most of my writing outside in nature, we felt this shot was most representative.

Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.

I always had this non-stop drive. I had to keep sending stories out and every once in awhile I'd get something accepted or get the little trickle of positive feedback.

ELANTRIS is a new BEN HUR for the fantasy genre, with a sweeping, epic storyline and closely personal characters.

The great secret behind classified projects is that most of them are so utterly boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn't even take a second look at them.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.

Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.

It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.

SHADOW PROWLER is a fresh, exuberant take on territory that will be familiar to all fans of classic high fantasy. Alexey Pehov introduces a cast of charming, quirky, unsavory, even loathesome characters in a fast-paced, entertaining adventure.