Dan Simmons Quotes
It`s odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn`t it?
As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.
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.
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
It`s one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
Writing, I`m convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.
It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.
I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.
I have more respect for The Iliad now than I`ve ever had, and I`ve always thought it was possibly the finest piece of literature there was.
But it`s not just a game of finding literary references.
The truth is, it`s not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.
There`s a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don`t believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.
As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it`s not meant to be a prediction.
No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
I really appreciated his theme of life evolving from one race of gods to another, with one power having to give way to another, as Hyperion must.
Finally, there`s the simple fact that I would be bored silly if I read in only one genre or one type of author - so why write in only one form?
