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"But it's not just a game of finding literary references."
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"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope-and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing-that I shall draw a letter that begins, 'Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with 'the reader.' And there's no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so."

"The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively."

"It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read."

"By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer's vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave."

"Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going."

"There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale."
Explore more quotes by Dan Simmons

"It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another."

"The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them."

"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."

"But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms."

"No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published."

"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."
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