My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.