Quotes by Dan Simmons

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

I love being a writer. It's the paperwork I can't stand.

"Do you like being a detective?"
"When I do it well."

The pack [of media] brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized [then] what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called "public's right to know".

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things--the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

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.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.