Dan Simmons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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