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.

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 had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.

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.

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

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.

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