The best place to start an adventure is with a quiet, perfect life . . . and someone who realizes that it can’t possibly be enough.

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.

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.

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.

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

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