Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons
Dan Simmonsis an American science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 April 1948
CountryUnited States of America
writing inspired terrified
No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
hero rocks water
A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.
wall light law
There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.
real childhood geography
What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?
essence civilization ideas
Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.
science thinking fiction
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
movie four definitions
Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
understanding lasts welcome
It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.
perfect creative mixtures
Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.
truth powerful skeletons
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
writing relax exhausted
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
moving careers truth-is
The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.
art drunk quality
Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.
ios want phrases
Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io. Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better. Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.