I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

- Dan Simmons

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction.

- Dan Simmons

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

- Dan Simmons

It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.

- Dan Simmons

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

- Dan Simmons

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.

- Dan Simmons

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.

- Dan Simmons

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

- Dan Simmons

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

- 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.

- Dan Simmons

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

- Dan Simmons

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

- Dan Simmons

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.

- Dan Simmons

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.

- Dan Simmons